Command line for creating partitions

[Robert Moskowitz]

I am working now more on handcrafting my SD cards for arm testing. 
Gparted did not do a good job, allowing me to make parititions not on 
'cylinder boundaries'.  And the labels it created were not recognized 
when I mounted the drive.  I had to use the disk utility to fix the 
labels.  Anyway, to script it and to put this up on some wikis, I really 
need to do this by command line.

So I have looked at both fdisk and parted.  Neither are for 'simple' 
command lines.  Fdisk takes me back to my DOS days (wonder where MS got 
it from?).

So first I want a command that will delete all partitions on /dev/sdb

then create a partition as ext3, then one as linux-swap, and finally 
ext4.  Of course, I understand how many MB I want each, but I am suppose 
to (or so from the warnings that 'fdisk -l' provided) maintain boundaries.

thanks for any pointers to the best tool(s) for this.  So far my search 
foo has only gone to old fdisk pages.