ruby: Can't create new file

Question

I have a command line program that asks the user a set of questions and stores them in a file. The only problem is, I need it to create a new file and it won't.

Here is what I have tried: File.open("path/to/file", "w")
and File.open("path/to/file", "w+")

Both times I get this error
in 'initialize': No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - path/to/file (Errno::ENOENT)

Here is my current code:
File.open("path/to/file", "w") { |f| f.write(array.join("\\n")) }

Answer 1

When someone writes path/to/file in a blog post or documentation, they don't intend for you to literally write path/to/file in your code. The point is that you need to edit that string to actually have the real path to your file, either as a relative path or an absolute path.

You said you are getting this error from the Ruby interpreter:

No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - path/to/file (Errno::ENOENT)

This means that in the current working directory, there is no directory named "path", or if there is a directory named "path", then it doesn't have a child directory named "to".

You could solve the immediate problem by running mkdir -p path/to , but that would be weird. It is better to just write an appropriate path in your code, pointing to a directory that already exists. Try changing the path to simply be output.txt (without any slashes) and see how that works.

Answer 2

Ensure you are using an absolute path, and if so, make sure the directory you want to store the file in is missing. Try creating it first:

require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p '/path/to'
File.open('/path/to/file', 'w') { ... }