As of October 2013 Ruby is supported on IBM i via PowerRuby. This is good news as Ruby has become a very popular programming language for producing web applications because of its simplicity, flexibility, and vast community. In this article we will be introducing you to tools that aid in learning Ruby on IBM i.

Often times the easiest way to learn a programming language is by starting small and playing with it. Ruby makes this very easy to do with its included Interactive Ruby Shell, or irb for short.

The irb environment is also called REPL (Read,

This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that more people have V7.1 in their shops, I decided it was time to revisit the series and add it to the collection. It is probably my all-time favorite BIF . . . at least so far.

Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through the target string and

Working on IBM i and its predecessor machines for 30 years, I sometimes have to modify or redo advice that I’ve relied on for years. Case in point: how full does your disk space have to be before you put your IBM i partition in danger?

I had an experience this month that made me question my assumptions on when you should worry about and how you should set your disk utilization thresholds. Here’s what happened.

What Went Before

In the past, I’ve recommended setting your disk utilization thresholds so that the IBM OS issues this system operator message when