load works on local path, require doesn't

loadee.rb

puts '> This is the second file.'

loaddemo.rb

puts 'This is the first (master) program file.'
load 'loadee.rb'
puts 'And back again to the first file.'

When I run `"ruby loaddemo.rb"`, This works fine. Both files are in the same directory, and that's the directory I run from.

But if I change the load to a require, and with or without the extension I get:

<internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require': no such file to load
-- loadee.rb (LoadError)
from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require'
from loaddemo.rb:2:in `<main>'

My question is of course, why isn't require working in this case? It should, right? Do load and require use different paths?

Ruby version 1.9.2

If you provide just a filename to `require`, it will only look in the predefined `$LOAD_PATH` directories. However, if you provide a path with your filename, it should work:

puts 'This is the first (master) program file.'
require './loadee.rb'
puts 'And back again to the first file.'


You could also add your project's folder to the load path instead:

$LOAD_PATH.unshift File.dirname(__FILE__)
puts 'This is the first (master) program file.'
require 'loadee.rb'
puts 'And back again to the first file.'

And last, you could just use `require_relative` instead:

puts 'This is the first (master) program file.'
require_relative 'loadee.rb'
puts 'And back again to the first file.'

Providing a path with the filename seemed not to work for me, and I didn't want to cram a bunch of paths into my `$LOAD_PATH`.

Checking out the [documentation][1], I found `require_relative`.

require_relative 'loadee'

Works in both `1.9.2` and `2.1.2`.

The [documentation][2] indicates that `require` is not intended to search relative paths at all, and neither is `load`.

[1]:

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[2]:

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