How to remove installed ri and rdoc ?

Question

How can I remove the ri and rdoc of installed gems? Thanks

Answer 1

You can simply remove the doc directory in the RubyGems installation directory.

rm -r `gem env gemdir`/doc

On Mac OS X by default, it's /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/doc.

Keep in mind that there might be several installation directories for RubyGems.

• RubyGems will try to install to your user directory (something like ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/) if it can't access the normal installation directory (e.g. you installed a gem without sudo).
• RVM also installs RubyGems for each Ruby it installs which will contain a doc directory containing rdoc and ri files (e.g. ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-preview1/doc).

This will merely remove existing files, but new ones will come with new installations anyway, unless you use the --no-ri --no-rdoc flags for gem install or make them default.