BSD `stat` and GNU `stat` take different options

[postmodern]

BSD `stat` and GNU `stat` take different options

[postmodern]

We definitely want ruby-install to support Linux as well as the BSDs. Perhaps a broader solution would be to detect if we are in a BSD environment vs. a GNU one?

[paul]

I don't think we can detect platform, since I am using OSX but installed the GNU coreutils from homebrew and added them to my default path because I prefer them for day-to-day things. Similar to the issue I linked, I think the best way would be to detect which option flag stat will understand:

if stat -c"%U" /dev/null >/dev/null 2>/dev/null ; then 
  # GNU stat
else
  # BSD stat
fi

Probably should just add this to the other conditionals like for auto-detecting the package manager. I'm not that familiar with low-level linux/bsd/posix things like this though, isn't there a better cross-platform way to determine the owner of a file? (As I ask that, I did some googling. Seems the only choices are stat or ls -ld | awk or perl. Ew.)

[postmodern]

Since we only call stat when dealing with homebrew on OSX, perhaps we could call /bin/stat instead?

[paul]

If that's the case, then yeah, that's probably the easiest and best solution.

[havenwood]

Looks like system stat at /usr/bin/stat should indeed do the trick.

[postmodern]

Fixed back in 0.3.1.