Maciej Pilichowski wrote:
>   I've just got very popular -- as I guess from google hits -- warning
> about insecure dir when I run something like this
>       puts %x{bzip2 -9 #{s}}
> where s is file to compress.
>
>   I found many 'solutions' by changing the access to directories to
> satisfy ruby, I don't want to do this but just turn *this* warning
> off. I found the answer -- setting $VERBOSE to nil works great,
> however I guess it shuts down all warnings.

There are also other answers, if you continue Googling. The first page
of google hits for that phrase includes both a patch to 1.8.5 as well
as several mentions of changing the $PATH.