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Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t.
$ brew install wget -
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into
/usr/local.$ cd /usr/local $ find Cellar Cellar/wget/1.12 Cellar/wget/1.12/bin/wget Cellar/wget/1.12/share/man/man1/wget.1 $ ls -l bin bin/wget -> ../Cellar/wget/1.12/bin/wget -
Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
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Trivially create your own Homebrew packages.
$ brew create http://foo.com/bar-1.0.tgz Created /usr/local/Library/Formula/bar.rb -
It's all git and ruby underneath, so hack away with the knowledge that you can easily revert your modifications and merge upstream updates.
$ brew edit wget # opens in $EDITOR! -
Homebrew formula are simple Ruby scripts:
require 'formula' class Wget < Formula homepage 'http://www.gnu.org/wget/' url 'http://ftp.gnu.org/wget-1.12.tar.gz' md5 '308a5476fc096a8a525d07279a6f6aa3' def install system "./configure --prefix=#{prefix}" system 'make install' end end