So I ran into a really strange issue in a rake task that downloads a zip file, then uses rubyzip to extract it. The download was working great, but rubyzip was puking trying to extract the file with a buffer error.
To make a long story short, instead of trying to figure out what was up with that, I decided to just use the built in system method in ruby. With system, you can call any arbitrary application that resides on the machine where the ruby code is executing. On my Ubuntu box I first installed unzip with sudo apt-get install unzip, then in my rake task system(“unzip #{path_to_zip_file}”).
Done deal. I can definitely foresee Ruby’s system method coming in handy in a lot of other situations as well.
As far as I know, windows doesn't ship a commandline "unzip"