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Comment by Rafert | Hacker News Reader

So, basically the same advice applies as with the upgrade to Yosemite: move /usr/local to somewhere like ~/local before upgrading, and move it back after.

It's worth mentioning that after the upgrade you might run into permissions problems: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/h...

You might want to run `brew update` before updating, so `brew doctor` can help you troubleshoot issues afterwards.

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hm, no worries at least on my machine.

I knew about /usr/local problem from Yosemite, though on El Capitan (same time as Yosemite, with /usr/local moved to ~/local) it was smooth as butter (I did not move /usr/local). All upgrade took about 30 minutes, and after it was done, I did sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local and I was good to go.

Good advice, I plan on running a quick rsync:

rsync -rtvpl /usr/local ~/usr.local.backup

Does OS X place any of its own files in /usr/local?

I can't speak to El Capitan, but no Apple software has dropped anything in /usr/local that I've found in the last 3+ releases. I'm very confident El Capitan would continue that history.

A lot of other apps do put stuff there though (when I wish they'd keep it in their own bundle).

Even worse, a lot of other apps drop stuff into /usr/bin.

They can no longer drop stuff in /usr/bin as of El Capitan, though.

You can't even do it with root:

    [mason@IT-PC-MACPRO ~]$ sudo bash
    Password:
    [root@IT-PC-MACPRO ~]# touch /usr/bin/nope
    touch: /usr/bin/nope: Operation not permitted
    [root@IT-PC-MACPRO ~]# cat 'nope nope' >> /usr/bin/nope
    bash: /usr/bin/nope: Operation not permitted

I can't verify but that would be awful it did as `/usr/local` is meant to be exactly not that.

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