It's one of the key differences between Homebrew and existing OS X package managers (Macports, Fink) and they talk about it quite a lot on the homepage and inst

It's one of the key differences between Homebrew and existing OS X package managers (Macports, Fink) and they talk about it quite a lot on the homepage and installation instructions. IMHO one of the reasons it's more popular. "The standard script installs Homebrew to /usr/local so that you don’t need sudo when you brew install" https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/homebrew/Installation.md#installation https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/h... "Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local." "Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like." http://brew.sh/ http://brew.sh/