getting rid of ruby gems that won't die

Question

I\'ve got a few ruby gems that won\'t go away.

I think it has to do with when I installed them. Occasionally I have forgotten to use \"sudo\" before doing a gem i

Answer 1

I had a similar issue, but the root problem turned out to be gemspecs that were sticking around for some unknown reason.

After I thought I had uninstalled all gems:

matt$ gem1.9 list
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
minitest (1.6.0)
rake (0.8.7)
rdoc (2.5.8)

No gems here:

matt$ ls -al /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin   68 Jul 23 14:54 .
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  admin  272 Mar  3 14:56 ..

There they are!

matt$ ls -al /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/specifications/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  admin  170 Jul 23 14:54 .
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  admin  272 Mar  3 14:56 ..
-rw-r--r--  2 root  admin  129 Nov  1  2010 minitest.gemspec
-rw-r--r--  2 root  admin  121 Nov  1  2010 rake.gemspec
-rw-r--r--  2 root  admin  121 Nov  1  2010 rdoc.gemspec

Remove the gemspecs:

matt$ sudo rm /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/specifications/*

And now the gems are gone:

matt$ gem1.9 list
*** LOCAL GEMS ***