From: Brett Williams <vor_lord@...>
Date: 2002-01-13T04:26:36+09:00
Subject: Easy way to interactively use Ruby with program

So I've read through the pickaxe book's chapter on extending Ruby, and the
appendix on irb... but I still haven't figured out how to do exactly what I
want to do (probably my fault... but maybe someone can help me).

What I wish to do is so simple that I'm sure there is a good established way
to do it.

I have a ruby program (it calls C libraries etc... does lots of stuff).
What I would like to do is to be able to call irb such that when the program
finishes, the user is left with a command prompt, and has access to
everything as if he had called the loads/requires methods etc. that the
program did himself.

Basically, the program needs to do a lot of startup work, and then give
control of the program to the user, with all modules, classes, variables,
and methods available at the prompt.

It seems like there should just be something like irb -f <script>