<p>I recently converted a ruby library to a gem, which seemed to break the command line usability</p>

<p>Worked fine as a library</p>

<pre><code>  $ ruby -r foobar -e 'p FooBar.question' # =&gt; "answer"
</code></pre>

<p>And as a gem, irb knows how to require a gem from command-line switches</p>

<pre><code>  $ irb -rubygems -r foobar
  irb(main):001:0&gt; FooBar.question # =&gt; "answer"
</code></pre>

<p>But the same fails for ruby itself:</p>

<pre><code>  $ ruby -rubygems -r foobar -e 'p FooBar.question'
  ruby: no such file to load -- foobar (LoadError)
</code></pre>

<p>must I now do this, which seems ugly: </p>

<pre><code>  ruby -rubygems -e 'require "foobar"; p FooBar.question' # =&gt; "answer"
</code></pre>

<p>Or is there a way to make the 2 switches work?</p>

<p><em>Note</em>: I know the gem could add a bin/program for every useful method but I don't like to pollute the command line namespace unnecessarily</p>

-rubygems is actually the same as -r ubygems.
It doesn't mess with your search path, as far as I understand, but I think it doesn't add anything to your -r search path either. I was able to do something like this:
```
```
ruby -rubygems -r /usr/lib/ruby/gems/myhelpfulclass-0.0.1/lib/MyHelpfulClass -e "puts MyHelpfulClass"
```
```
MyHelpfulClass.rb exists in the lib directory specified above.
That kind of sucks, but it at least demonstrates that you can have multiple -r equire directives.
As a slightly less ugly workaround, you can add additional items to the ruby library search path (colon delimited in *nix, semicolon delimited in windows).
```
```
export RUBYLIB=/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/myhelpfulclass-0.0.1/lib
ruby -rubygems -r MyHelpfulClass -e "puts MyHelpfulClass"
```
```
If you don't want to mess with the environment variable, you can add something to the load path yourself:
```
```
ruby -I /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/myhelpfulclass-0.0.1/lib \
   -rubygems -r MyHelpfulClass -e "puts MyHelpfulClass"
```
```