How can I call dos commands in Ruby and get the results?

Question

There is a command I want to call that returns a string, I want to call this command while inside a ruby script, and have access to the result.

Answer 1

I am assuming by command you mean an OS command.

# this will execute ls and assign the dir listing to the variable
dir_list = `ls` 
os_user  = `whoami`

Answer 2

you have the method Kernel#system too http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Kernel.html#M005971

system "dir"