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

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.