brew: Error: Another active Homebrew process is already in progress.

Brew says there is “Another active Homebrew process” but there isn’t, according to ps.

brew update
Checking out v1.0.4 in /usr/local/Homebrew...
# .. success ..
# .. no warnings about failing to, e.g. delete a lock file ..

brew update
Error: Another active Homebrew process is already in progress.
Please wait for it to finish or terminate it to continue.

ps auxwww | grep brew
jared            3906   0.0  0.0  2461036    156 s000  R+   11:12AM   0:00.00 grep brew

Maybe brew failed to clean up a lock file?

Details: Filesystem permissions look OK to me

brew --prefix
/usr/local

ls -al /usr/local
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   15 root   wheel    510 Sep 19 11:41 .
drwxr-xr-x@  13 root   wheel    442 Nov 23  2015 ..
drwxr-xr-x   55 jared  admin   1870 Sep 19 11:49 Cellar
drwxr-xr-x   52 jared  admin   1768 May 24 15:18 Frameworks
drwxr-xr-x   16 jared  admin    544 Sep 26 11:10 Homebrew
drwxr-xr-x  417 jared  admin  14178 Sep 21 11:06 bin
drwxr-xr-x   18 jared  admin    612 Sep 21 11:06 etc
drwxr-xr-x    6 jared  admin    204 Mar 13  2015 foreman
drwxr-xr-x    7 jared  admin    238 Mar 13  2015 heroku
drwxr-xr-x  182 jared  admin   6188 Sep 21 11:06 include
drwxr-xr-x  439 jared  admin  14926 Sep 21 11:06 lib
drwxr-xr-x   55 jared  admin   1870 Sep 21 11:06 opt
drwxr-xr-x    2 jared  admin     68 Sep 19 11:41 sbin
drwxr-xr-x   35 jared  admin   1190 Sep 21 11:06 share
drwx------   10 jared  admin    340 Sep 19 11:40 var

Details: doctor has no relevant warnings.

Warning: Your Xcode (7.3) is outdated
Please update to Xcode 8.0.
Xcode can be updated from the App Store.


Warning: Some keg-only formula are linked into the Cellar.
Linking a keg-only formula, such as gettext, into the cellar with
`brew link <formula>` will cause other formulae to detect them during
the `./configure` step. This may cause problems when compiling those
other formulae.

Binaries provided by keg-only formulae may override system binaries
with other strange results.

You may wish to `brew unlink` these brews:
    homebrew/versions/qt55

I hope this is enough information to help!

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Comments: 18 (6 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I’ve had something like this before. In my case, I didn’t have a brew process running, but there was still a ruby process hanging around. Once I killed that, things went back to normal

Thanks, but at the time of the issue, I also grepped ps for ruby, and there was no ruby process running.

jaredbeck on Sep 26, 2016