Ruby: stack level too deep (SystemStackError)

Question

Ruby is crashing in Cygwin for rails and bundler.

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p374 (2013-01-15 revision 38858) [i386-cygwin]

Chloe@dumbopc /cygdrive/c/Sites
$ rails -v
Rails 3.2.11

Chloe@dumbopc /cygdrive/c/Sites
$ cd testapp

Chloe@dumbopc /cygdrive/c/Sites/testapp
$ rails -v
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/requirement.rb:114: stack level too 
deep (SystemStackError)

Chloe@dumbopc /cygdrive/c/Sites/testapp
$ bundle install
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/...........
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/..
Unfortunately, a fatal error has occurred. Please see the Bundler
troubleshooting documentation at http://bit.ly/bundler-issues. Thanks!
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/bundler-1.2.3/lib/bundler/friendly_errors.rb:32: 
stack level too deep (SystemStackError) 

I tried both versions of Ruby, ruby 1.9.3p327 and ruby-1.9.3-p374-1. I found something from Google that hinted that 1.9.2 might fix the problem, but I could not select that in setup.exe. I also tried

peflags -x8192000 `which ruby`

which did not help. I also tried 18192000. I uninstalled Ruby and re-installed. Same with rails. It only fails when it's inside of an app directory. When I try

rails new testapp

It creates the directory and files, but fails on bundle install . I can't run rails -v in that directory either. I suspect there are other commands that will fail too, but I haven't found them yet. I'm using Windows XP SP3.

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 dumbopc 1.7.17(0.262/5/3) 2012-10-19 14:39 i686 Cygwin

Here are the bad lines if you are curious

$ rails -v
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/requirement.rb:114: stack level too 
deep (SystemStackError)
$ cat -n /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/requirement.rb | grep '^ *114'
   114      requirements.map { |op, version| "#{op} #{version}" }.sort
$ bundle install
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/bundler-1.2.3/lib/bundler/friendly_errors.rb:32: 
stack level too deep (SystemStackError)
$ cat -n /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/bundler-1.2.3/lib/bundler/friendly_errors.rb |  grep '^ *32'
    32        raise e

I also tried all the suggestions from bundler following its link. I added -d to the rails script and it printed this:

$ rails -v
Exception `LoadError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:1264 - cannot load such file -- rubygems/defaults/operating_system
Exception `LoadError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:1273 - cannot load such file -- rubygems/defaults/ruby
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=0.9.2.2>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=10.0.3>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.5>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.6>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=0.9.2.2>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=10.0.3>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.5>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.6>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=0.9.2.2>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=10.0.3>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.5>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.6>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=0.9.2.2>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=10.0.3>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.5>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.6>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=0.9.2.2>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=10.0.3>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.5>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.6>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=0.9.2.2>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=rake version=10.0.3>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.5>
Exception `NoMethodError' at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:1495 - undefined method `to_ary' for #<Gem::Specification name=json version=1.7.6>
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/requirement.rb:118: stack level too deep (SystemStackError)


$ head -1 /usr/bin/rails
#!/usr/bin/ruby.exe -d

Answer 1

I think your peflags command line is wrong. Try:

peflags -X409600 `which ruby`

as described here .

Answer 2

Same thing happened to me. I uninstalled ruby from the cygwin setup file, and when I ram ruby -v in CMD, it was still there!

Turns out, I have other instances of ruby.exe in the "PATH" environment variables. So check your environment variables, uninstall everything and see if there is another ruby file it is pointing to.