title: How to stop the 'gem' utility from accessing my home directory?
body: <p>When I run </p>
  
  <pre><code>gem install &lt;somegem&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>command the <code>gem</code> utility tries to access my home directory. It contains some non-latin characters and installation fails because of that. For example: </p>
  
  <pre><code>E:\ruby\bin&gt;gem install &lt;somegem&gt;
  ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Errno::ENOENT)
      No such file or directory - C:\Documents and Settings\&lt;user&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I switch to another user account with a username containing ASCII characters only <code>gem</code> works fine.</p>
  
  <p>Does anybody know how to tell gem NOT to check my home directory?</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: I tried to set up GEM_HOME as suggested below but it didn't help (still checks the user home directory)</p>