I'm not sure whether this is possible or not, but I know that Ruby
allows you to make system calls in many different ways, and I
generally use:

system "echo Hello"

or something when I want to call outside of the script.  What I would
like to know is if it is possible to make these system calls
interactive?  For instance, I was toying with directory manipulation
using system "cd .." system "pwd", etc., and I noticed that no matter
what the call, Ruby will always return to the same directory on the
system "pwd" command.

I was wondering if it is possible to send multiple commands so you
could be a bit more interactive with it?  I know there are libraries
out there to do this for me, but I am looking at this more from the
standpoint that I'm not planning on using this ability for directory
manipulation.

Another thing I was wondering is whether you can get output from the
terminal on system calls.  I tried somethign like this:

system "pwd"
gets directorystring
puts directorystring

Only my script doesn't get the input at all, and hangs(expecting an
input I assume).

How can you usefully use system for calling functions if it doesn't
remember state(directory, for instance), or allow you to get back
terminal information?