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-document flag for gem install or make it a default.

Answer 2

It worked for me when I tried this:

gem rdoc <gem name> --no-ri --overwrite

Then you can remove only ri of the gem, and leave the gem itself. I don't see we need any other way around for this.