Homebrew doctor warning: you have unlinked kegs in your Cellar

Question

How do you fix this?

$ brew doctor
...
Warning: You have unlinked kegs in your Cellar
Leaving kegs unlinked can lead to build-trouble and cause brews that depend on
those kegs to fail to run properly once built.

    imagemagick
    jasper
    libtiff
    little-cms
...

For future users -> this is automated script http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/125319/53973 — jeet.chanchawat, Mar 13 '16 at 05:52
It would be nice to understand why this typically happens. For software installations managed 100% through brew, how do kegs become unlinked in the first place? — jarmod, Sep 07 '22 at 15:49

Synchro · Accepted Answer · 2023-08-02T14:46:58.610

25

Like this, for each unlinked keg:

brew link imagemagick

If you don't want to keep them, brew cleanup should get rid of them.

edited Aug 02 '23 at 14:46

answered Jul 27 '12 at 10:23

Synchro

609

7

What if I have removed those 'kegs' previously? Why are they still there? I don't want to 'link' them again, I want to get rid of them. – Peter Štibraný Jan 08 '13 at 21:30
9

brew cleanup will get rid of unused stuff – Adam Nelson Oct 25 '13 at 09:25
@PeterŠtibraný I also didn’t want to link to the unlinked version of something I already had via brew (no idea) so brew cleanup then brew upgrade and another (possibly excessive tidying) `brew cleanup worked for me. – Dave Everitt Aug 02 '23 at 10:56

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 29 '16 at 18:46

6

i ran below command and the problem is gone...

"brew upgrade"

answered Dec 29 '16 at 18:46

sh6210

161

1

That worked for me too, good catch. – dsomnus Oct 20 '17 at 14:40

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 22 '16 at 07:32

4

brew link --overwrite imagemagick

repeat it for each and it will solve the issue

answered Apr 22 '16 at 07:32

Sami Elkady

154

Homebrew doctor warning: you have unlinked kegs in your Cellar

3 Answers3