Homebrew cask option not recognized?

Question

I am following an online resource for installing two Mac utilities

http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-make-that-caps-lock-key-useful/

Here is the pertinent section:

Install both Karabiner and Seil. (Here again, if you use Homebrew Cask, you can do this with

$ brew cask install karabiner and

$ brew cask install seil

But the cask option is not recognized?

06:51:35/shared $brew cask install seil
Error: Unknown command: cask

Then, just for laughs I tried the command without the cask:

06:55:01/shared $brew install seil
Error: No available formula for seil
Searching formulae...
Searching taps...
Caskroom/cask/seil

It is not clear what the last line of output even means: nothing seems to have happened on the system.

I am on Yosemite.

Answer 1

As of 2021, the answer to this question for me was that instead of

brew cask install myprogram

I should run:

brew install --cask myprogram

Answer 2

UPD: since the command brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask gives you the following error Error: caskroom/cask was moved. Tap homebrew/cask instead. please run brew install homebrew/cask

To use brew cask you should have it installed, this is a extension of brew, is not native.

To install it you need to run brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask from your command line

Homebrew Cask Github

Answer 3

I had the same issue. Now you should use:

brew install --cask <package>

instead of:

brew cask install <package>

Answer 4

You can also just brew install Caskroom/cask/seil. It will automatically tap the correct cask for you :)

Answer 5

brew tap caskroom/cask

brew install brew-cask

Now, you are ready to brew cask.

Answer 6

Install it with this command:

brew install brew-cask-completion

Answer 7

None of these answers—despite some of them being correct at the moment—are showing their work and so may become no longer correct if this changes again.

I ran into this issue, stumbled on this page, and it was enough to get me curious about the change in command line and where that might be documented. Turns out you can go right here:

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/

and any of those you click on will show you the current command to use. So, for instance, the iterm2 page:

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/iterm2

right at the top it's got the correct command to use so if they ever change it, you'll see what the new syntax is.

Answer 8

I don't why the highest voted answer doesn't work for me. But you can do something like brew install homebrew/cask/appName

Answer 9

With macOS Big Sur , running brew install ... will works

Answer 10

For me,

brew install <program_name> has worked fine till now.

For example, I was trying to install Oracle Virtual Box and the formula for it was listed as

$ brew cask install virtualbox.

But, $ brew install virtualbox worked just fine. I found that it was installing the application as cask as shown in the screenshot.

I think homebrew automatically takes care of the cask dependency.

Answer 11

Since Homebrew 2.6.0 released in 2020.12.01, brew cask has been deprecated and later dropped.

Homebrew not only manages TUI packages (formulae from the homebrew-core repo), it's also capable of managing GUI packages (casks from homebrew-cask repo). In the old days, brew commands like brew list, brew outdated take effect only on formula. Cask operations are separated into brew cask.

Homebrew has prioritized support for casks since 2.6.0. All the brew commands take effect on both formulae and casks. You must specify --formula or --cask explicitly to indicate them separately.

# Some examples
brew list # both formula and cask
brew list --formula
brew list --cask

brew outdated # both formula and cask
brew outdated --formula
brew outdated --cask

Answer 12

@JeremyJohn answer is out to date, for installing Android sdk you should use this command:

brew install --cask android-sdk

Answer 13

One other thing to check is that it may be installed but not linked:

$ brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
Warning: caskroom/cask/brew-cask-0.59.0 already installed, it's just not linked

This is easily fixed by running:

$ brew link brew-cask