David Chelimsky: Lessons in Spec'ing

Lessons in Spec'ing

David — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:30:14 -0400

Lesson: system calls in specs do stuff on your system. Be careful.

I was trying different things to understand why a spec was failing and, at one point, put a pending statement in a spec that generates a file and then deletes it. The statement that deletes the file is in an after(:each) block (which is guaranteed to run) and looks like this:

system(%Q|rm "#{dir}/#{filename}"|)

Imagine my horror when I saw this in the output:

rm: /: is a directory

"Lessons in Spec'ing" by Bob

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:18:08 -0400

I dont understand why that does not work :(

"Lessons in Spec'ing" by Lance Carlson

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:27:12 -0400

at least it wasn’t..

sudo rm -rdf /

;)

"Lessons in Spec'ing" by James Hill

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:03:07 -0400

Luckily you weren’t at the school of hard knocks that day ;-)

"Lessons in Spec'ing" by Ashley Moran

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:19:21 -0400

I came across this the other day, although not tried it yet: http://rubyforge.org/projects/mockfs/

I don’t like the way you have to modify your application code to use it, but it’s nice that one line of config stops real filesystem access.

"Lessons in Spec'ing" by krotty.korobka.net

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:48:17 -0400

Somebody even shipped it with File::Remove (perl): http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/34680

"Lessons in Spec'ing" by rubyruy

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:40:16 -0400

That is so especially scary in a oh-god-it-could-happen-to-me kind of way…