timharvey.net

RubyGems error: marshal data too short

Legacy Post!
I've flagged this post as it is either, 1) No longer relevant/useful, or 2) Doesn't reflect my current thinking. Rather than delete these outdated posts, I've left them up so that search engine links remain intact and as a history of previous perspectives.

UPDATE (7:21pm)

So…I find out that RVM symlinks into .gem/, so deleting completely may have been a bad idea. But…I was able to do rvm reload and rvm update --head that seem to have restored the symlinks I broke in the process. Life is good again.

While trying to install the latest Rails3 beta, I was beating my head against the following error:

ERROR: While executing gem ... (ArgumentError) marshal data too short

I’m running RVM and despite attempts to run gem install rails --pre on various ruby versions, every time I got the some error.

After bruising my head against nearby objects for a while, I found a small reference on a blog about gems in ~/.gem. After wiping them out, everything worked great! In the process, I blew away /usr/local/ copies of the gems as well (so your mileage may vary).

Published April 16, 2010

other posts »