MacOS SIP – How to Upgrade SVN on OSX 10.11 El Capitan with SIP Enabled

Until all the kinks get worked out, you'll want to track 10.7 and Xcode 4.x issues at https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues

In this case, be sure you actively manage your $PATH variable to keep your preferred versions of redundant apps first in the expansion.

Always hard coding full paths is tedious, but lack of it causes these bumps when new binaries show up in your path unexpectedly.

There is a better and safer way to specify which version of an executable you want your computer to use without having to modify the executables that came pre-installed on your Mac. It's generally not recommended to alter your default system tools in any way.

You can take advantage of the PATH environment variable, which allows you to list several directories that you want your Mac to search in when looking for executables.

In order to use the latest version of svn, or any other tool you installed in /usr/local/bin with Homebrew (or MacPorts, manually, etc), you want to tell your Mac to first look in /usr/local/bin before it looks in the default /usr/bin. You do that by defining the PATH in your .bash_profile, which is a file that gets loaded automatically every time you open a new Terminal window.

You can write the PATH to your .bash_profile by running this one-liner from the Terminal:

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

This command takes everything between the single quotes (echo) and adds it (>>) to a file called .bash_profile in your user’s root (or home) directory (~/).

To have these changes take effect, you can either quit and relaunch Terminal, or run this command:

source ~/.bash_profile

If you want to do it all manually, open your .bash_profile with your favorite editor, then add this line to it:

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

and save it. Then quit and relaunch Terminal.