[snip]
        while rec = File.new(fullFileName).gets("\r\n")      
                puts "Record: "+rec
        end

for a file whose content is say:

AAA
BBB
CCC

with \r\n as the record separator (determined by viewing with a hex
editor).  What I expected is:

Record: AAA
Record: BBB
Record: CCC

What I got is:

Record: AAA
BBB
CCC
Record: AAA
BBB
CCC
[ad nauseum]

So it appears that IO$gets returns a array of "lines" again and again,
rather than each "line" successively, as described in Programming
Ruby.

The kernel$gets works by returning individual lines and recognizes the
\r\n delimiter automatically. I had to go to the IO version because I
wanted to read from multiple files and needed to know the name of the
file being read, which didn't seem possible if I passed an array to
ARGV.  Resetting ARGV with different filenames was flagged as an
error.

I don't want to read the entire file into memory for several reasons.
My application may encounter excessively large files.  Secondly, my
application runs in a thread that processes the latest records added
to the file and idles when there are no new records to be inspected.

Any suggestions?

TIA,
Richard

This should do it ...

File.open('test.dat') do |fi|
  while rec = fi.gets
    puts "Record: " << rec
  end
end

# Record: AAA
# Record: BBB
# Record: CCC

daz

I solved one part of my problem, i.e. how to loop through individual
lines in a given text file, by using IO.foreach, e.g.:

IO.foreach(fullFileName) { |rec| processRec(rec) }

That routine recognized the \r\n delimiter implicitly.  However, it
surprised me by returning an empty record after the final char(s),
i.e. the delimiter.  That wasn't mentioned in The Pragmatic
Programmer's Guide.  Am I misinterpreting anything here?

For the second part, how to continually monitor a file to get the next
unread record or an "EOF" return code allowing the thread to wait and
again test for the availability of an unread record (appended by some
other thread), I think I need to access a Win32 routine.  I'm going to
check that out now.  If anyone has a suggestion about this approach,
I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Regards,
Richard

Thanks not only to the succint solution to my problem:

Regards,
Richard

Richard