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Sam Buchanan's weblog.

Stack Level Too Deep

December 23, 2005

I mentioned a while back that I couldn't get Rails installed on Jaguar. Actually, RubyGems was the problem. Something I'd read led me to believe it was a core ruby problem, but after a bit of thinking that just didn't seem right. So I kept trying different things, and still kept getting a message "stack level too deep".

At this point two things became clear:

  1. I've been slacking off on my Unix skills, because this should be more obvious; and
  2. late-night hacking isn't doing much for my Google skills, either.

Finally I found an answer. I added ulimit -s 8192 to my .zshenv (yes, I'm a Z shell user), which increases the stack size. After that, everything worked like a charm. Editing the same line to /etc/rc.common should also work, but I played it safe by affecting only my account and am happy so far.

I'm especially happy because now I can dive into Rails with gusto. Until I got it working at home, my Rails exploration was limited to staying an hour late at work once a week.