DISQUS

Thanks for taking the time to write this - it made me laugh! No, not like that, but rather with complete sympathy. I'm also a developer forced to do sys admin on occasion and I completely understand your pain. For the likes of us it is simply no fun and to "black arts" to feel like it's worth the time and effort it always seems to take.

I've saved your solution to this problem to my own wiki because in all likelihood someday this'll bite me on the ass too.

Well-written.

Your phenomenally annoying ad block that obscures a third of your post and follows me down the page prompted me to leave
this page just as quickly as I cam here (note that this comment has hard returns in it because the ad block is currently
obscuring 1/3 of the comment area - I could resize my browser window but the very idea of doing so to accommodate this
amazingly annoying ad irks me too much).

I think you would do well to find an ad mechanism that isn't so obtrusive.

I seem to have missed typing a crucial " " in that last comment. Should read: 'Ruby is first doing "a" "b" to get...'

Ha! Nice catch in the %{"a""b"} however I don't it's a corner-case but rather some Ruby string concatenation weirdness (or rather perhaps is a Ruby corner-case instead of a Shellwords corner-case). Basically Ruby is first doing "a" "b" to get "ab" and then treating that as the string to operate on in

I didn't know that about Ruby's string concatenation until I read this post:

http://pivots.pivotallabs.com/users/nick/blog/a...

(I should point out, for hyper-sensitive web, that I'm not arguing against your implementation but simply enjoying that there's more than one way to do this. Had I not discovered Shellwords last week then this week I'd be using your code in my current project instead.)

Nice reg-ex. I've always liked the Shellwords module for this:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Shellwords...

With examples:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/ja/man/html/shellwords...

I feel exactly the same way, except a little more peeved than you since Parallels did promise free upgrades for a year and are now reneging on that promise. For the interested, my open letter to Paralles is here: http://www.postal-code.com/binarycode/2007/06/0...