I think this is pretty cool. I've wondered what a ruby shell would look like. I don't "get" bash at all, but I find ruby very natural. I've gotten better at writing bash one-liners for basic sysadmin tasks, however anything more complicated is hopeless. I've found it easier to write chef scripts to automate any server task than using bash.
I'm no sysadmin, but I think you're doing it right as is. Scripting languages and DSLs like Chef are designed to be a better solution for those problems than shell scripts.
It's kind of funny, in a way. Perl was originally a scripting language for sysadmin tasks designed to replace shell scripts, that matured into a programming language, that influenced the Ruby programming language, from which we have a Ruby shell in which, presumably, we can write shell scripts again.
I'm no sysadmin, but I think you're doing it right as is. Scripting languages and DSLs like Chef are designed to be a better solution for those problems than shell scripts.
It's kind of funny, in a way. Perl was originally a scripting language for sysadmin tasks designed to replace shell scripts, that matured into a programming language, that influenced the Ruby programming language, from which we have a Ruby shell in which, presumably, we can write shell scripts again.