brew_outdated

brew_outdated is a utility for keeping your brew-installed executables up-to-date. It examines your shell history and looks for executables which have been recently used and are out-of-date according to brew outdated. It will only detect executables which were installed by brew.

Supports bash, zsh, fish, and nu.

Does not currently support finding out-of-date executables which were installed by brew cask.

brew_outdated runs brew update in the background to update brew and the brew formulae, so the suggestions for updates stay accurate. If this update fails, brew outdated will display a message next time it is run.

brew_outdated is about as fast as the brew outdated it relies on, so is recommended to run it in your shell's startup file.

Installation

To install, run

cargo install brew_outdated

Usage

To run, ensure that ~/.cargo/bin is in your PATH, and run with

brew_outdated

If you would like to run it each time you start a new shell, you can add it to your shell's startup configuration file. Here are the locations of startup configuration files for the supported shells:

shell	default config location
bash	~/.bashrc
zsh	~/.zshrc
fish	~/.config/fish/config.fish
nu	can be configured under the startup config option: https://www.nushell.sh/blog/2020/04/21/nushell_0_13_0.html#startup-commands-jonathandturner

Output

When brew_outdated detects out-of-date executables, it will advise you of the packages responsible for those executables with a message like:

You have recently used out-of-date executables which are managed by `brew`.
Consider updating the following:
	fish (installed: 3.1.0, available: 3.1.2)
	git (installed: 2.25.0_1, available: 2.26.2_1)
	go (installed: 1.14.2_1, available: 1.14.3)
To upgrade all of these in one command, run `brew upgrade fish git go`

When brew_outdated does not detect any out-of-date executables, it does not produce any output.