Brew installed, linked, but not found

Question

I just installed mtr via Homebrew, and it completed seemingly successfully (i.e., nothing unusual).

MBA% mtr
zsh: command not found: mtr

That's odd. I figured I'd try again:

MBA% brew install mtr
Warning: mtr-0.86 already installed

Okay, maybe it's symlinked as mtr-0.86:

MBA% mtr-0.86
zsh: command not found: mtr-0.86

Nope, okay, maybe it just failed to link:

MBA% brew link mtr
Warning: Already linked: /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.86
To relink: brew unlink mtr && brew link mtr
MBA% brew unlink mtr && brew link mtr
Unlinking /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.86... 3 symlinks removed
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.86... 2 symlinks created
MBA% mtr zsh: command not found: mtr

However:

MBA% /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.86/sbin/mtr
[Success]

What's going on? Why is Homebrew failing to link (and creating fewer symlinks on relinking for that matter..)?

Solution 1

I saw the same when installing brew 0.86. While most binaries get linked to /usr/local/bin, brew get's linked to /usr/local/sbin. This is absolutely right but you need to extend your path in order to avoid typing the whole path.

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"

will fix it once and you will need to adjust your .bash_profile to fix it permanently

Solution 2

For mtr v0.86 and below:

brew install mtr
ln /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.86/sbin/mtr /usr/local/bin/mtr
sudo mtr superuser.com

But since mtr v0.87 one more command is needed:

ln /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.92/sbin/mtr-packet /usr/local/bin/mtr-packet

Solution 3

Add /usr/local/sbin to current PATH variable and make persistent.

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"
sudo echo '/usr/local/sbin' >> /etc/paths

Comments

[OJFord]

(Keen-eyed may note that mtr needs root. Yes. By [Success] I mean it complained about just that, rather than failing to even run.)

[Tuanitim]

Actually mtr was already in /usr/local/sbin. The solution of adding /usr/local/sbin to the PATH is better.

[styfle]

Since macOS no longer uses bash as the default shell, it would be better to edit /etc/paths instead of .bash_profile. See stackoverflow.com/a/16288733/266535