Error trying to update brew package manager

Question

I tried updating brew:

sudo brew update 

But I got this error:

Error: your local changes in the following files will be overwritten with merge:

Enumeration of a large number of files

Error: crash while executing git pull http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git wizard

Any idea what is going wrong?

Answer 1

There was a bug in Homebrew that was fixed just a few days ago. To fix the error, you can run git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD inside your Homebrew installation. Since this will not fix files that are already considered changed, you can also run the git checkout Library to replace your check with the latest files. (This wipes out all the changes, so take appropriate action with any changes you make.)

Answer 2

The accepted answer is correct, but incomplete. If you get an error message

Error: the following files of the unprocessed tree files will be overwritten by merging:

Then go to your terminal and run these commands

 cd /usr/local 

Then

 git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD 

Then

 git checkout Library 

It should be all right. Then run

 brew update 

Answer 3

Let me add: cd /usr/local/git and then run git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD

Answer 4

go to your terminal and run these commands

 cd /usr/local sudo git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD sudo git checkout Library 

Answer 5

For those of you using OS X El Capitan, protecting your system integrity may be your problem.

If /usr/local already exists, run the following in Terminal:

 sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local 

If /usr/local does not exist:

First try creating /usr/local usual way:

 sudo mkdir /usr/local && sudo chflags norestricted /usr/local && sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local 

If you see permission problems try:

1. Reboot in recovery mode (hold Cmd + R at boot) and gain access to the terminal.
2. In this terminal, run: csrutil disable
3. Reboot back to OS X
4. Open the Terminal application and run the line at the top
5. Reboot back into recovery mode and access the terminal again.
6. In this terminal, run: csrutil enable
7. Reboot into OS X and you can write to / usr / local & install Homebrew.

Answer 6

For no reason (or at least I would not understand) the repository in /usr/local (which is brew install!) Lost its remote repository. Thus, neither a git reset nor a git pull , and, of course, there will be a brew update .

How do you know that this happened? Check /usr/local/.git/config for lines like:

 [remote "origin"] url = http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* 

If you do not do the following:

 cd /usr/local git remote add origin http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git git pull origin master