I run my Mac with a non-admin account. When I want to install or update Homebrew applications, I su to my admin account and use sudo. Just checked my /usr/local and it's owned by root. I've never had a problem running Homebrew apps from my non-admin account.

That's very clever. There is one problem though, now make clean all install is run as root (well maybe install stages now in homebrew). Imagine an env var not set (the way make vars interact give lots of way to shoot off a big toe here) and the wrong dir gets rm_-rf_-ed or it obliterates something in /bin instead.

If you don't run brew as root you at least protect places like /usr/lib, but you are protected from that and more with macports (where stages and uses nobody).

But for now your approach seems the best pragmatic course to take, thank you for the suggestion.

This sounds like the best suggestion/solution in this thread. But if you run brew from admin, why can't admin take ownership , and run brew without sudo?

So that Homebrew always requires my password to install an app, just like native OS X installs. It also preserves the default permissions. And it's not that hard to sudo.

    > Homebrew always requires my password to install an app

But isn't that _less_ safe?

Instead of trusting Homebrew with /usr/local, you have to trust every formula with `sudo`? Or does it only use sudo for part of it, a `mv` or something?