High Sierra and coreutils

Since MacOS High Sierra has been out for a long time this is probably old news to the tiny minority using coreutils. When you upgrade you might find that “df” and other commands don’t work properly.

Every time I opened a terminal after upgrading I saw errors saying commands had been aborted. When I ran “df” it would abort immediately.

I thought the upgrade had damaged my filesystem, especially since it introduced APFS. I ran “First Aid” in Disk Utility several times, both live and in recovery.

It then occurred to me to try the MacOS df in /bin/. It worked!

Coreutils is the package that includes lots of command line tools like “df”. I installed it using brew so the following fixed the problem:

brew reinstall coreutils

I noticed it put everything in /usr/local where my original commands were in /opt/ so changing the PATH in my .zshrc was necessary too. Everything was back to normal again! 🙂

EDIT: Some other commands were messed up. “find” had changed, but then I realised it probably isn’t in coreutils and I was using the MacOS version. This page led me to the right package names and the following command line:

brew reinstall coreutils findutils gnu-tar gnu-sed gawk gnutls gnu-indent gnu-getopt --with-default-names

The “–with-default-names” parameter restores the original filenames, removing the “g” prefix. Everything outside of the coreutils went in /usr/local/bin/ which I made sure was added to the path too.

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