I use Lion, and the svn /usr/bin/svn is 1.6 version. As I need to use subversion 1.7, I installed svn from brew to be installed in /usr/local/bin/svn.
How can I disable the svn* files so that I can use svn from brew?
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Sign up to join this communityI use Lion, and the svn /usr/bin/svn is 1.6 version. As I need to use subversion 1.7, I installed svn from brew to be installed in /usr/local/bin/svn.
How can I disable the svn* files so that I can use svn from brew?
There is a better and safer way to specify which version of an executable you want your computer to use without having to modify the executables that came pre-installed on your Mac. It's generally not recommended to alter your default system tools in any way.
You can take advantage of the PATH environment variable, which allows you to list several directories that you want your Mac to search in when looking for executables.
In order to use the latest version of svn, or any other tool you installed in /usr/local/bin
with Homebrew (or MacPorts, manually, etc), you want to tell your Mac to first look in /usr/local/bin
before it looks in the default /usr/bin
. You do that by defining the PATH
in your .bash_profile
, which is a file that gets loaded automatically every time you open a new Terminal window.
You can write the PATH to your .bash_profile by running this one-liner from the Terminal:
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
This command takes everything between the single quotes (echo
) and adds it (>>)
to a file called .bash_profile
in your user’s root (or home) directory (~/)
.
To have these changes take effect, you can either quit and relaunch Terminal, or run this command:
source ~/.bash_profile
If you want to do it all manually, open your .bash_profile
with your favorite editor, then add this line to it:
PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"
and save it. Then quit and relaunch Terminal.
/usr/local/bin
is before /usr/bin
and I still get the latter when I execute svn
. How is that possible?
Sep 13, 2016 at 9:18
NOTE: monfresh's answer below is better than mine. While my method will work, it is not recommended to rename or edit system utilities.
When I needed to upgrade from SVN 1.6 to 1.7, I installed my built version (not using Homebrew or Macports, etc.) in /usr/local/bin
and renamed all the old svn executables in /usr/bin
to (executablename)-1.6.7.
So now which svn
gives /usr/local/bin/svn
and the old /usr/bin/svn
is /usr/bin/svn-1.6.17
.
/usr/bin
just to get them out of the way leaves you open to upgrades restoring them, or breakage of programs that depend on them. Why not just put /usr/local/bin
first in your PATH
?