I've been using Rakefiles a lot recently to automate tasks. I find it really useful in comparison to shell scripting as I can run the rakefiles under different OSes (OS X and Windows) and have it behave the same in all cases.
I was building a simple script to automate the generation of pgn files for my chess games. I wanted to be able to enter the details of the games on the command line and then have my script output a pgn file.
I didn't want to have to go messing about with low level operations such as puts and gets so I searched for something better. I found the Highline gem for this and was really happy with it.
It allows for a variety of input formats
To display a prompt to the user and then store the input in a variable use
event = ask("Event Title: ")
You can specify default values and the default will be listed as part of the prompt. On the command line simply hit enter to get the default value.
timeControl = ask("TimeControl: ") { |q| q.default = "5400+15" }
You can create a menu from an array of values using the choose function.
result = choose("1-0", "1/2-1/2", "0-1", "*")
These can be customised and there are a lot more options available such as entering passwords. If you are doing text input in Ruby, I would advise checking it out.
→ posted on April 14, 2015developmentchess