This is a really crazy set of failures for such a small change.

Maybe System.console() is not working as expected or there is some bug?
The laguage specs fail for instance with:

Global variable $?
- is read-only
- is thread-localirb(main):001:0> 

And it's just doing:

some/ruby -e "exit 0"

Does it still work as expected if you pipe input to the process?

cat mydata | jruby -ne '...'

Yes - that's what the System.console() != null check is for. It should be null if stdin is not connected directly to a terminal.

Ok I guess I was not aware one could tell the difference. If so I don't think anyone intentionally types Ruby without a pipe or redirection

I don't think anyone intentionally types Ruby without a pipe or redirection

This is actually in response to user testing with real people doing that and then sitting there staring at it for ages waiting for it to do something. They tend to be non Ruby programmers just wanting to experiment with Ruby like they do with Python and Node.js.

Ah I came from awk, Perl, and all the languages which do sit there. I agree that if you can know this case it seems like a good idea to enter a repl. It might be worth also creating an RFE on Ruby lang