Ohai is a great little gem for gathering data about a system – used in Chef but also useful on its own. The documentation for it from the Chef site shows you how to load all available plugins, but you might have reason to load only a select one or two, then query the data. [...]
ruby thought of the day – if you ‘load’ a file that in turn ‘requires’ other files, the rules of *require* apply to the children, not *load*
HighLine is great if you are formatting shell: #!/usr/bin/env ruby require ‘rubygems’ require ‘highline’ green_yes = hl.color "yes", :green