Looking into a ruby gem - Question for David Berube

[Matthew Taylor]

Hi David!

A lot of developers I work with don't like to include "third party" code in any of their applications unless they know how it works. Is there a way to "unzip" a ruby gem to see the underlying code? Are they produced using a reliable standard, or can anyone just throw together a gem that may be inconsistent or malicious?

Thanks!

[David Berube]

Sure. You can unpack a gem using the gem unpack command; so, if you have installed a gem named "linguistics," you can unpack it into the current directory as follows:

gem unpack linguistics

Take it easy,

Dave