RI

Background

ri is a tool that allows Ruby documentation to be viewed on the command-line. It is part of RDoc and is expected to work on any platform supported by Ruby.

ri will be a bit slow the first time that it runs (or any time that the underlying documentation changes) because it builds a cache in the .ri directory within the user’s home directory in order to make future accesses faster.

Usage

To see information for a class, do:

ri class_name

For example, for the Array class, do

ri Array

To see information for an instance method, do:

ri class_name#method_name

For example, for Array’s join method, do:

ri Array#join

To see information for a class method, do:

ri class_name.method_name

For example, for Module’s private method, do:

ri Module.private

To search for all methods containing read, do:

ri read

To search for all methods starting with read, do:

ri '^read'

To search for all read methods, do:

ri '^read$'

Options

ri supports a variety of options, all of which can be viewed via --help. Of particular interest, are:

-d directory

List of directories from which to source documentation in addition to the standard directories. May be repeated. This can be used to specify the location of site-specific documentation (which can be generated with RDoc).

-i

This makes ri go into interactive mode. When ri is in interactive mode, it will allow the user to disambiguate lists of methods in case multiple methods match against a method search string. It also will allow the user to enter in a method name (with auto-completion, if readline is supported) when viewing a class.

-T

Send output to stdout, rather than to a pager.

All options also can be specified through the RI environment variable. Command-line options always override those specified in the RI environment variable.

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