brew: Homebrew Cannot Update, Doctor, Unlink, etc.

Bug reports:

I ran a brew update yesterday unproblematically. Today, no matter what I try to do, I’m getting the following response:

Error: Could not symlink bin/easy_install
Target /usr/local/bin/easy_install
is a symlink belonging to python. You can unlink it:
  brew unlink python

To force the link and overwrite all conflicting files:
  brew link --overwrite python3

To list all files that would be deleted:
  brew link --overwrite --dry-run python3

Executing any of the brew link or brew unlink commands results in the same error. Removing the symlink and rerunning the command gives the same error; the symlink file reappears after any such attempt. I get the same error in response to a brew doctor command. I’m kind of at a loss here.

I also attempted the following:

chown -R $USER:admin /usr/local
cd /usr/local
git reset --hard origin/master
brew update

which, again, resulted in the same error.

I’ve made no changes since yesterday except that I upgraded my copy of Xcode (and the Xcode command line tools), so I’m guessing that’s what might be responsible somehow. Any suggestions as to how I might produce better information on what’s going on here would be welcome…

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 22 (14 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@enriquefernandez

First, did that fix the problem for you?

We’re migrating /usr/local/Library/LinkedKegs to /usr/local/var/homebrew/linked (and /usr/local/Library/PinnedKegs to /usr/local/var/homebrew/pinned for that matter) and unfortunately there were bugs in migration code that had done damage that may be hard to remedy within brew without a lot of complication.

AN OLD COMMAND THAT’S NO LONGER NEEDED

What is that supposed to do?

Blow away the old directory that somehow failed to migrate.

Do I need to “refix” that somehow?

You may need to brew unlink $(brew ls); brew link $(brew ls) to restore keg links into /usr/local/var/homebrew/linked (ignore the keg-only warnings).

zmwangx on Sep 17, 2016

Latest update. If you update to the latest version of brew it should probably heal itself now. Make sure you run brew update TWICE.

Caution: This workaround may not be up-to-date!

Before anything else, to update brew to the latest (assuming brew is installed to /usr/local):

cd /usr/local; git fetch; git reset --hard origin/master

Please AN OLD COMMAND THAT’S NO LONGER NEEDED and that should probably get you back on your feet again. Sorry.

Note: Please run the above command with caution. It’s probably best to take a look at what’s inside /usr/local/Library/LinkedKegs first and make sure they’re nothing but a bunch of symlinks.

There’s a brief explanation of what happened below.

zmwangx on Sep 17, 2016

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/992 or similar will hopefully address this case a bit better.

MikeMcQuaid on Sep 17, 2016