How to List Brew Dependencies

Feb 3, 2014

Recently, after updating my installed brews, I wanted to see a list of dependencies for each installed brew. Homebrew provides a couple of useful commands to show dependencies.

brew deps

You can see the dependencies for a given brew by running the brew deps command.

$ brew deps osxfuse
autoconf
automake
gettext
libtool

brew uses –installed

You can also ask brew to tell you which brews use a particular formula with brew uses --installed.

$ brew uses --installed autoconf
automake fuse4x htop-osx osxfuse sshfs

The --installed parameter is important, without it the results will be all brew formulas, installed or otherwise.

Brew Dependencies

Both of these are useful commands but I wanted a way to list all installed brews along with their dependencies. This is the “one-liner” I came up with after some experimentation.

$ brew list | while read cask; do echo -n $fg[blue] $cask $fg[white]; brew deps $cask | awk '{printf(" %s ", $0)}'; echo ""; done

The color specifications here are for zsh. If you want to use this command on bash it would look like this.

$ brew list | while read cask; do echo -n "\e[1;34m$cask ->\e[0m"; brew deps $cask | awk '{printf(" %s ", $0)}'; echo ""; done

Here is a sample of the output.

$ brew list | while read cask; do echo -n $fg[blue] $cask $fg[white]; brew deps $cask | awk '{printf(" %s ", $0)}'; echo ""; done
 apple-gcc42
 autoconf
 automake  autoconf
 cscope
 faac
 ffmpeg  faac  lame  pkg-config  texi2html  x264  xvid  yasm
 fontconfig  freetype  libpng  pkg-config
 freetype  libpng
 fuse4x  autoconf  automake  fuse4x-kext  gettext  libtool
 fuse4x-kext
 gettext
 git
 giter8
 glib  gettext  libffi  pkg-config  xz
 gnu-go
 htop-osx  autoconf  automake  libtool
 imagesnap
 jenkins
 lame
 libdvdcss
 libevent
 libffi
 libgpg-error
 libiconv
 libksba  libgpg-error
 libpng
 libtool
 libxml2
 libxslt  libxml2
 libyaml
 macvim  cscope
 mercurial
 mtr  pkg-config
 ngrep
 openssl
 ossp-uuid
 osxfuse  autoconf  automake  gettext  libtool
 pkg-config
 popt
 readline
 reattach-to-user-namespace
 sbt
 scala
 sqlite  readline
 sshfs  autoconf  automake  gettext  glib  libffi  libtool  osxfuse  pkg-config  xz
 szip
 texi2html
 tig
 tmux  libevent  pkg-config
 vim
 wget  openssl
 x264  yasm
 xvid
 xz
 yasm
 youtube-dl

And here is a screen shot showing the colors.

brew dependencies