Silence is Foo Mental notes on Ruby, Git, Rails and whatever geeky thing

[Today's Frustration] “The Invalid Gem Format” message

I was installing a gem when suddenly:

ERROR: Error installing the_gem:
invalid gem format for /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/cache/the_gem-0.0.0.gem

I got frustrated because the error message doesn't tells much about the real error, which I still don't know what is, the only thing we can figure out reading the message is that rubygems is trying to install the gem from a directory called /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/cache/.

This is not the first time it happens to me, I just forgot how to fix it, this is why I wrote this post, to have a place to refer to when this happens to me again.

All I needed to do was to delete the gem from the cache folder, but, just to be sure I deleted everything:

rm /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/cache/*

Maybe your path is different, I found another one in the following path, so:

rm /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/cache/*

Et Voilà!