`brew upgrade` hangs on El Capitan

Question

I can't run brew upgrade without it hanging indefinitely. I'm using El Capitan OS. Here's the input/output:

>>$ brew upgrade
Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 2 taps (homebrew/core, homebrew/science).
==> Updated Formulae
artifactory         dovecot             node@4              scamper
chromedriver        node-build          openvpn
==> Deleted Formulae
pdksh

==> Upgrading 10 outdated packages, with result:
gcc 6.2.0, gdbm 1.12, libtiff 4.0.7, openssl 1.0.2j, pkg-config 0.29.1_2, python 2.7.12_2, homebrew/science/r 3.3.2, readline 7.0.1, sqlite 3.15.2, yara 3.5.0_1
==> Upgrading gcc
Warning: Building gcc from source:
  The bottle needs the Xcode CLT to be installed.
==> Using the sandbox
==> Downloading https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gcc/gcc-6.2.0/gcc-6.2.0.tar.bz2
Already downloaded: /Users/r8t/Library/Caches/Homebrew/gcc-6.2.0.tar.bz2
==> Downloading https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/formula-patches/e9e0e
Already downloaded: /Users/r8t/Library/Caches/Homebrew/gcc--patch-863957f90a934ee8f89707980473769cff47ca0663c3906992da6afb242fb220.patch
==> Patching
==> Applying 6.1.0-jit.patch
patching file gcc/jit/Make-lang.in
==> ../configure --build=x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/gc
==> make bootstrap

And then nothing.

Solution 1

• ctrl + c to exit the hanging upgrade.
• Run brew doctor. It prompted me to
• run brew cleanup to clean up false symlinks. Then I
• ran brew doctor again and it prompted me
• to install xcode CLT via the command sudo xcode-select --install.
• Finally brew update worked.

Solution 2

It could be downloading something large and taking a long time. Try running the following so you can see the download progress:

brew update --debug --verbose

Solution 3

Verbose mode does work for me:

brew update --verbose

Solution 4

To add to the answer of @travelingbones, installation of gcc gets stuck when you do perform brew upgrade. You can further verify it by running this command

Verification of problem

brew install gcc

Instead of this, Doing following, speeds up the process, as brew installs precompiled version of gcc after x-code installation

Do this instead

sudo xcode-select --install
brew install gcc

View more solutions