Make irb work with special characters on Windows

Recently, someone asked how to enable special characters such braces or brackets for irb on Windows (these characters are essential in almost every Ruby program). The solution has been previously discussed on Ruby-talk.

As far as I remember, recent versions of the One-Click installer already include such a fix. However, my Ruby installation at work is a bit dated and irb did not work properly for my installation yet.

It was a bit tricky to create the files .inputrc and .ircrc as the Windows shell did not allow me to create these files. "touch" to the rescue! I fired up Cygwin and issued

touch .inputrc"
touch .ircrc"

Afterwards, everything else went fine.