Reset IRB Console

Question

How does one go about saying goodbye to all constants, objects, and the like defined in an irb session to return to a clean slate? By "in", I mean without manipulating subsessions.

Krafftebing

Quit and restart? irb isn't exactly heavy weight enough to worry about restarting it. – Jewell

Answer 1

Type

exec($0)

in your irb console session.

Woodnote

+1 LOL, awesome answer. And save a character and your shift key with exec $0 – Physician

exec __FILE__ would be better since it reload any scripts pulled in with IRB too: give exec $0 in rails console, and you'll see what I mean. However, these commands don't maintain any options that were passed when executing irb (e.g. irb --prompt simple), and they'll both fail in a subsession. – Krafftebing

Pretty clever. Of course I'm not sure if this is faster than CTRL+D, ↑, enter. – Raconteur

Perhaps this might be of some help to you? #4749976 Making a custom irb might be the only way to do it. – Woodnote

Customization did work; a custom IRB altogether would have been overkill. I ended up adding a function to irbrc that creates/destroys isolated namespaces wherein I can play. – Krafftebing

Answer 2

i am using fedora 16, exec $0 do not work for me. but i found the the way below:

CTRL+L or system("clear") or system("reset")

Tramontane

system("command") actually executes the command in a subshell. The man pages tell us that clear will simply "clear the terminal screen". While reset comes with a few more bells and whistles, it still yields only a superficial change. Anything instantiated in the IRB session still lives on in memory. Sunny J's suggestion cleverly executes the command used to jump into IRB in the first place. I'm a bit puzzled, however, why you had trouble. What output do you see on puts $0? – Krafftebing

Answer 3

On Windows (CMD): system("cls")

Folkway