The latest release of rush sports a handful of convenience methods on the top-level module for local access:

Nicholas Schlueter has created Rushmate, an integration library to let you use rush from within TextMate. This is a more flexible way of locating and manipulating files than either TextMate’s find-in-project search or a standard bash or Ruby script. Check out the source and docs.

The file manipulation routines in Ruby’s stdlib are a bit of a mess. Operations are scattered among different classes - File, Dir, and FileUtils. Methods often aren’t where you expect them - like File.directory? but not Dir.directory?. But worst of all, they aren’t object-oriented. You’d want to make calls like f.size or f.directory?, but instead you’re stuck with File.stat(f).size and File.directory?(f).

rush 0.4 released. Some changes:

• Rush::Box#processes returns a ProcessSet, for syntax like this:

processes.filter(:cmdline => /mongrel_rails/).kill

I’ve posted my slides from my talk rush, the Ruby shell and Unix Integration library, which I presented today at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.

You can read the full details, but here’s a tantalizing sample:

New features include:

• an exceptions framework (communicated across the wire - an exception on the remote box raises the same exception locally)
• Box#bash to execute arbitrary bash command (returns stdout, raises an exception with stderr if shell command returned failure)
• FindBy extensions for processes.find_by_pid(123) and processes.find_all_by_cmdline(/mongrel_rails/)
• Process#parent and Process#children
• Process#kill doesn’t return until the process is really dead (courtesy of the god code)
• Improved tab completion

Programmers generally agree that working iteratively is a good idea. But sometimes, we’ll say: you just can’t. This particular problem has to be done in one big bite; there’s no way to break it down into smaller pieces; we just have to take the plunge.

Mirko Stocker interviewed me for this InfoQ article on rush.

I’ve created a mailing list for rush, since discussion in the comments was getting a bit unwieldy.

rush now has RDocs and a gem.

The unix shell (bash) and remote login (ssh) are centerpieces of the server and app deployment process. While building Heroku, however, Orion and I became aware that these tools are pretty far out of step with modern, agile development practices.