MacOS – Identifying where a package came from

administratorcommand linemacospackage-managementUtilities

I just tried to upgrade nmap with my package manager but got knocked back because it's supposedly not installed. Even though it is:

brew upgrade nmap  
Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
No changes to formulae.
Error: nmap not installed

nmap --version 
Nmap version 6.40-2 ( http://nmap.org )
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0
Compiled with: liblua-5.2.2 openssl-0.9.7l nmap-libpcre-7.6 nmap-libpcap-1.2.1 nmap-libdnet-1.12 ipv6
Compiled without:
Available nsock engines: kqueue poll select

brew info nmap
nmap: stable 7.60 (bottled), HEAD
Port scanning utility for large networks
https://nmap.org/
Conflicts with:
  ndiff (because both install ndiff binaries)
Not installed
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/nmap.rb
==> Dependencies
Required: openssl ✔
Optional: pygtk ✘
==> Options
--with-pygtk
    Build Zenmap GUI
--HEAD
    Install HEAD version

Is it possible to find how a package, utility, or application came to be present, and/or installed on a macOS host? I recall being able to do something like this in the past, on a Linux (Debian) host, and figured there might be some kind of system or utility in place for macOS.

Best Answer

This will show you your installed brew packages

brew list

There may be options in other package managers, but nmap can also be installed by downloading the disk image and installing manually.

Related Solutions

MacOS – OS X Package Management

Good question:

For me, macports is the one.

Why? I'll bypass a lot of stuff and cut right to the chase:

The party is over with regard to malware, trojans and the like. Paging through the last security update, there were some vulns that were from the summer although the cure only came last week. Redownload the developer tools, recompile your macports install, and you have a functioning toolchain that is not dependent on Cupertino, since the Dev Tools from your install disk will serve. Who uses an old version of Openssh? Now it does take some care and feeding, like running port selfupdate every day, and the big tip is to check

port variants

so if you have a python dependency, you can run

port install python +no_tkinter

and avoid the agonizingly long Tk install, which would be most unwelcome on a Quartz architecture anyway.

With this, you can freely run software update and not have your stuff break, since it does not depend on anything but the compiler from apple. I've used it for a long time, and although I tried some others, namely Homebrew, I think that depending on apples versions means inheriting their security flaws. Remember that PDF hole on the iphone? I deploy on Linux anyway, so for me, macports tree is the 'office' and my budding MacOS dev career is 'home'

Just an opinion, but the separate tree for all the code is a big plus for me.

MacOS – Missing “show package contents” cmd

Show Package Contents is not for showing the contents of .pkg files, it's for showing the hidden structure for Applications (and other bundles), which are actually folders. You can use the program Pacifist to look at the contents of .pkg files.

To answer the question in your comment, here's how you can tell in Terminal. When you perform an ls -l command, directories have d as the first character in the line.

516 $ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x    3 steve  admin         102 Jan  6  2011 Form Viewer.app
drwxrwxrwx@   3 root   admin         102 Jan 18  2010 FormViewerFonts.pkg
-rw-r--r--@   1 steve  staff  2157020198 Jun 30  2012 MacTeX-2012.pkg

In this example, the first two entries are bundles and the last isn't.

Related Question