I was kind of an idiot in my last post. I wrote a ruby script to symlink my gems' executables to /usr/local/bin. Well that's dumb. There's a much better way to accomplish the same goal, with some healthier side effects! It's called rvm (or Ruby Version Manager)!

rvm allows you to manage multiple versions of ruby that are installed to a location in your home directory. You can select a version of ruby to use for current session with rvm use 1.9.2 That command will use ruby-1.9.2, provided you installed it with rvm. To install: rvm install 1.9.2 When you have a version of ruby selected, gems will install into the directory that houses that version of ruby, and won't pollute your system install of ruby.

App::perlbrew (installable through cpan) does exactly the same thing, albeit with Perl! I heartily recommend both if you do development with either ruby or Perl.