Install multiple homebrew formulas at the same time

Question

You can install multiple homebrew formulas by brew install package1 package2. But if you have a text file with all the packages that you would like to install. How would you do it?

brew install < packages.txt doesn't work. It gives me the response: This command requires a formula argument

Answer 1

Like this:

brew install $(cat packages.txt)

or even just

brew install $(<packages.txt)

Answer 2

Here's an alternative one-line approach, which bypasses the need to create a file as an in-between step:

Syntax:

brew install $( brew search my-search-term | grep my-filter-term | tr '\n' ' ' )

vs.

brew search x | grep y > install_list.txt
brew install $( < install_list.txt )

Alternative (using awk):

brew search x | awk '/inclusion string/ && !/exclusion string/' | tr '\n' ' ' )

---

Example:

Suppose I wanted to install all the Nerd Fonts not currently on my machine in one go.

brew search fonts will give multiple rows in results – similar to the default output from ls:

brpro ➜ ~ brew search font
==> Partial Matches
birdfont                       font-hack-nerd-font
dfontsplitter                  font-hack-nerd-font-mono
font-3270 font-halant          font-noto-sans-tibetan
font-3270-nerd-font ✔          font-hammersmith-one
font-3270-nerd-font-mono ✔     font-han-nom-a
font-abeezee font-hanalei      font-noto-sans-vai
(...)

Piping the output to grep -i nerd gives a single line-separated list of only the taps we want.

brpro ➜ ~ brew search font | grep -i nerd
font-3270-nerd-font
font-3270-nerd-font-mono
font-anonymouspro-nerd-font
font-anonymouspro-nerd-font-mono
font-arimo-nerd-font
font-arimo-nerd-font-mono
font-aurulentsansmono-nerd-font
(...)

We can use tr to convert this output to a whitespace-separated single line:

brpro ➜ ~ brew search font | grep nerd | tr '\n' ' '
font-3270-nerd-font font-3270-nerd-font-mono font-anonymouspro-nerd-font font-anonymouspro-nerd-font-mono (...)

Now we just need to pass the result to brew install:

brew install $( brew search font | grep nerd | tr '\n' ' ' )

Pipes! Composition! Joy!

La voie Unix!