My problem is that during or after running a process which uses Ruby intensively, when I use any gem command including gem --version or gem install rake, it hangs for just over a minute and then gives me this error: $ gem list /Users/username/.rvm/bin/gem: line 5: /Users/username/.rvm/bin/gem: Argument list too long /Users/username/.rvm/bin/gem: line 5: /Users/username/.rvm/bin/gem: Unknown error: 0 file at : line 5: /Users/username/.rvm/bin/gem #!/usr/bin/env bash if [[ -s "/Users/username/.rvm/environments/ruby-1.8.7-p334" ]] ; then source "/Users/username/.rvm/environments/ruby-1.8.7-p334" exec gem "$@" # this is line 5 else echo "ERROR: Missing RVM environment file: '/Users/username/.rvm/environments/ruby- 1.8.7-p334'" >&2 exit 1 fi The only way that I have found to get this working again is to restart my computer, which is obviously undesirable. I am using OSX 10.6.5 I have spent quite a while trying to find anyone else who has had this problem, and been unsuccessful. Do you have any idea why this might be happening?