File manipulation

Some decades ago, one of the few options (if not the only option) for saving information was storing it in files. All sort of data was stored in these files: passwords, user data, config data, and more. Saving information in plain text files was, at the time, the most feasible option to save information. It all came to an end with the advent of databases (DBs) and DB usage. DBs became a more feasible and popular option, and they now came in different flavors. While this is still true today, using a DB comes with a quite expensive cost. I’m not only talking about a monetary cost – I’m talking about it in terms of memory, disk, and processing time. So, in certain use cases, it’s still a much better option to use plain text files to store information. To that purpose, most programming languages, including Ruby and PHP, make this task straightforward. Let’s take a look at how we can take advantage of the file manipulation tooling that...