# Trouble with gem update on Mac OS X

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/trouble-with-gem-update-on-mac-os-x/72506>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [October 17, 2006, 6:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/trouble-with-gem-update-on-mac-os-x/72506 "2006-10-17T18:35:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![phrogz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/2acd7d/32.png) [@phrogz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/phrogz)\
**Post date:** [October 17, 2006, 6:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/trouble-with-gem-update-on-mac-os-x/72506/1 "2006-10-17T18:35:37Z")

</div>

This morning I found that my laptop had an older version of gems on it  
(0.8.11).

1. I ran “gem update --system” and got errors (because I wasn’t running  
it as root–oops).

2. I then ran “sudo gem update --system” and it worked. (Yay! 0.9.0)

3. I then ran “gem list a” and saw a nice list of all my local gems.  
(Yay!)

4. I then ran “sudo gem update attributes” and got an error message.  
(I’m sorry, I didn’t copy the text down.)

5. I then ran “sudo gem uninstall attributes” and got a message that it  
had successfully uninstalled attributes 3.2.0.

6. I then ran “sudo gem install attributes” and got an error message.  
(Again, I didn’t copy it down. However, it was the same error message I  
got previously when my gem cache was corrupted.)

I didn’t have time to hunt down the cache and clean it out and see if  
that would fix it. However, I thought I would report that either (1) or  
(2) above seems to have corrupted something about my rubygems  
install/cache.

This is on Mac OS X 10.4.8, with my own (well-functioning)  
/usr/local/bin build of ruby 1.8.5