Ruby can be a good choice as scripting language and here is an example doing some video conversion. This might be less trivial to implement as shell script.

Writing short automation scripts is a common task. The first language choice is normally a shell script. But figuring out the right syntax can be a daunting task.

If the task has a certain complexity it might be easier to switch to another language.

Ruby is a high level language perfectly suited for this kind of task.

It has really well designed System APIs and comes with all the tools you need.

Even better is that the focus on usability also extends to third-party modules and you have a big community providing you everything you need.

Another nice thing about Ruby is that you don’t need to look up APIs that often because they work exactly the way you would expect them to.

Here is a short script to take some screenshots of a video collection: