I can't believe I've never directly played around with memcached :P

ruby-memcached/plain.rb

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+require 'socket'
+
+def main
+  @client = TCPSocket.new('localhost', 11211)
+  @client.puts ARGV.first
+
+  while line = @client.gets
+    puts line
+    case line.chomp
+    when 'END'
+      break
+    when 'ERROR'
+      return 1
+    end
+  end
+
+  return 0
+ensure
+  @client.close if @client
+end
+
+if $0 == __FILE__
+  exit main
+end