Rails Send Data Through a Pipe with IO.popen

While having trouble getting Unix zip to play nice with Ruby's Tempfile I found that it was much easier to just avoid a temp file altogether by using a pipe create with IO.popen. Example code below shows how you might zip up a directory and send it back to the user from a controller:

	def self.make_zip_io
	cmd = "sh -c 'cd /somewhere && zip -r - stuff'"
	IO.popen(cmd)
	end
	def zip
	io = self.class.make_zip_io
	send_data(io.read, :filename => 'filename.zip', :type => 'application/zip')
	end

view raw gistfile1.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub