Wholeheartedly agree with not using sudo if not necessary, though. That seems to have become a bad habit for a lot of people.
`/usr/local/bin` is typically in root's PATH, so root will faithfully search for programs in this directory. If root (or an admin group) does not have sole write privileges to that directory, it becomes a very easy to exploit privilege escalation vulnerability.
What _is_ risky about running `sudo make install` and the like, is that the Makefile may have malicious / risky code that may get executed as root.
Summary:
If you trust / verify the code you are installing, and you want it to be globally available, install it with sudo.
If you aren't willing to install as root, but want it to be available to a group of users, install to another directory not in root's PATH.
Otherwise just install to ~/bin
However, if you'd like to install the gem just for yourself set the proper environment variables and install to your home folder.
RVM is not an overkill. It is simply the right tool for the job in case you are doing ANY ruby related development.
If you don't, then it's "sudo gem nstall". It will install it system wide using system provided ruby binaries.
