So I just installed ruby 1.9.1 through MacPorts and wanted to easily migrate my rubygems across from 1.8 to see which ones would fail to install.

Thought about it for a while, then came up with the following bash one-liner to do it:

gem list | grep "(" | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs -L 1 gem1.9 install

NB: Installing Ruby 1.9.1 through macports sudo port install ruby19 means I get ruby1.9, gem1.9 and rake1.9 installed alongside my usual 1.8 ruby, gem and rake.

That grabs the list of installed gems from gem, searches for lines containing “(” so it only grabs the gem names, spits out the first section of the line, which is the name of the gem, and finally calls gem1.9 install for each line via xargs -L 1. Make sure to run it as root or prefix gem1.9 with sudo. (Or let it install in your home folder, but I hate that.)

From my quick run of the above snippet, 75% of my gems installed (73 out of 98) and the other few that failed to install were ones like Hpricot that require native extensions compiling. You can see the entire list of failures and successes of the gems in this pastie