Common Issues

This is a list of commonly encountered problems, known issues, and their solutions.

Ruby bad interpreter: /usr/bin/ruby^M: no such file or directory

You cloned with git, and your git configuration is set to use Windows line endings. Don't do that.

Ruby bad interpreter: /usr/bin/ruby

You don't have a /usr/bin/ruby or it is not executable. It's not recommended to let this persist, you'd be surprised how many .apps, tools and scripts expect your OS X provided files and directories to be unmodified since OS X was installed.

brew update complains about untracked working tree files

After running brew update, you receive a git error warning about untracked files or local changes that would be overwritten by a checkout or merge, followed by a list of files inside your Homebrew installation.

This is caused by an old bug in in the update code that has long since been fixed. However, the nature of the bug requires that you do the following:

cd $(brew --repository)
git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD

If brew doctor still complains about uncommitted modifications, also run this command:

cd $(brew --repository)/Library
git clean -f

launchctl refuses to load launchd plist files

When trying to load a plist file into launchctl, you receive an error that resembles

Bug: launchctl.c:2325 (23930):13: (dbfd = open(g_job_overrides_db_path, [...]
launch_msg(): Socket is not connected

or

Could not open job overrides database at: /private/var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist: 13: Permission denied
launch_msg(): Socket is not connected

These are likely due to one of two issues:

1. You are using iTerm. The solution is to use Terminal.app when interacting with launchctl.
2. You are attempting to run launchctl while logged in remotely. You should enable screen sharing on the remote machine and issue the command using Terminal.app running on that machine.

brew upgrade errors out

When running brew upgrade, you see something like this:

$ brew upgrade
Error: undefined method `include?' for nil:NilClass
Please report this bug:
    https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/checklist-before-filing-a-new-issue
/usr/local/Library/Homebrew/formula.rb:393:in `canonical_name'
/usr/local/Library/Homebrew/formula.rb:425:in `factory'
/usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples/brew-upgrade.rb:7
/usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples/brew-upgrade.rb:7:in `map'
/usr/local/Library/Contributions/examples/brew-upgrade.rb:7
/usr/local/bin/brew:46:in `require'
/usr/local/bin/brew:46:in `require?'
/usr/local/bin/brew:79

This happens because an old version of the upgrade command is hanging around for some reason. The fix:

$ cd $(brew --repository)/Library/Contributions/examples
$ git clean -n # if this doesn't list anything that you want to keep, then
$ git clean -f # this will remove untracked files

Python: Segmentation fault: 11 on `import <some_python_module>

A Segmentation fault: 11 is in 95% due to a different Python executable used for building the software vs. the python you use to import the module. This can even happen when both python executables are the same version (e.g. 2.7.2). The explanation is that Python packages with C-extensions (those that have .so files) are compiled against a certain python binary/library that may have been built with a different arch (e.g. Apple's python is still not a pure 64bit). Other things can go wrong, too. Welcome to the dirty underworld of C.

To solve this, you should remove the problematic formulae with those python bindings and all of it's dependencies.

• brew rm $(brew deps <problematic_formula>)
• `brew rm <problematic_formula>
• Also check the $(brew --prefix)/lib/python2.7/site-packages directory and delete all remains of the corresponding python modules if they were not cleanly removed by the previous steps.
• Check that which python points to the python you want. Perhaps now is the time to brew install python.
• Then reinstall `brew install <problematic_formula>
• Now start python and try to import the module installed by the <problematic_formula>

You can basically use any Python (2.x) for the bindings homebrew provides, but you can't mix. Homebrew formulae use whatever python is in your PATH.

Python: Fatal Python error: PyThreadState_Get: no current thread

This happens for pygtk and/or pygobject and related modules, for the same reason as described above. To solve this, follow the steps above.