How to avoid “cannot load such file — utils/popen” from homebrew on OSX

Question

I\'m getting an error when I run brew in the terminal:

 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.0/usr/lib/ruby/2.0.0/rubygems/core         


        

Answer 1

After updating to El Capitan, /usr/local has root:wheel rights.

Change the rights back to the user using:

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

and:

brew doctor && brew update

This helped me to get Homebrew working again.

Answer 2

First, open a terminal session and run:

cd /usr/local/
git status

to see if Homebrew is clean.

If it's dirty, run:

git reset --hard && git clean -df

then

brew doctor
brew update

If it's still broken, try this in your session:

sudo rm /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current
sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current

This will force Homebrew to use Ruby 1.8 from the system's installation.

Answer 3

This issue should be fixed in the newest version of Homebrew. Try reinstalling it, which is described on the Homebrew home page.

Answer 4

Uninstall homebrew:

 ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall)"

Then reinstall

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Warning: This script will remove: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/ - thks benjaminsila

Answer 5

The problem mainly occurs after updating OS X to El Capitan (OS X 10.11) or macOS Sierra (macOS 10.12).

This is because of file permission issues with El Capitan’s or later macOS's new SIP process. Try changing the permissions for the /usr/local directory:

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

If it still doesn't work, use these steps inside a terminal session and everything will be fine:

cd /usr/local/Library/Homebrew  
git reset --hard  
git clean -df
brew update

This may be because homebrew is not updated.

Answer 6

In my case I just needed to remove Homebrew's executable using:

sudo rm -f `which brew`

Then reinstall Homebrew:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"