I installed factory_girl (2.6.0) for a project I am working on recently, and all of a sudden I started getting errors with RubyGems when I would try to run a rake task, such as:

Invalid gemspec in
[/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/capistrano-2.11.2.gemspec]:
invalid date format in specification: "2012-02-22 00:00:00.000000000Z"

Invalid gemspec in
[/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/capistrano-2.9.0.gemspec]:
invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-24 00:00:00.000000000Z"

I went through the long process of uninstalling all my gems, running an update on RubyGems using ‘gem update –system’ and then reinstalling them again via ‘bundle install’. Still the gems were uninstalled, yet the specification errors were still occurring.

I tried to run ‘gem cleanup’ or ‘gem pristine –all’ to get rid of the error. Eventually I was able to resolve the issue, but I don’t remember exactly how I did it. Then today I go to work on another workstation, and the same thing occurs. It turns out that the invalid strings just need to be removed from the specification files.

As the errors pointed to files in /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/ (I’m using MacPorts), running these commands resolved the issue for me.

cd /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/

sudo find . -type f | sudo xargs perl -pi -e 's/ 00:00:00.000000000Z//'