Ok, here goes - an itch that needed some scratching.
Whereas the following two scripts are not general purpose read/write from/to LIF-files, they do read an ascii file from a LIF-file and write an ascii file into a LIF-file. From the web site:
"lifasread " - a Ruby script to read an ascii file stored in a lif-formated file (used by the HP-41 as file format on mass storage mediums. Tested on Linux. Run the script with the -h (or --help) option to see how it is used.
"lifaswrite " - a Ruby script to write a text file to a lif-formated file (the reverse of "lifasread". Run the script with the -h (or --help) option to see how it is used.