gem's environment

When playing with gem on my Ubuntu machine, I found an useful command

huy@huy-desktop:~/.gem$ gem environment 
Rubygems Environment:
  - VERSION: 0.9.0 (0.9.0)
  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /var/lib/gems/1.8
  - GEM PATH:
     - /var/lib/gems/1.8
  - REMOTE SOURCES:
     - http://gems.rubyforge.org

that shows default gem's environment. By setting the GEM_PATH environment variable to one desire directory, we can share single gem repository across many ruby installations (e.g C ruby and JRuby). The full descriptive information of all gem environments variables can be found in Gem Command References