The cause for this is more than likely a pending macOS update (as pointed out below). You can get the name from the list command.Īs it was mentioned in the comments here is the man page for the softwareupdate tool.Ī lot of users are experiencing problems where softwareupdate -install -a will in fact not update to the newest version of Xcode. You can use softwareupdate -list to see what's available and then softwareupdate -install -a to install all updates or softwareupdate -install to install just the Xcode update (if available). The command you need to update Xcode is softwareupdate command. Hence the error message you got - the tools are already installed.

As long as everything worked, I'd clone that to my main drive or repeat the wipe/reinstall process - whichever is easier for you to perform.What you are actually using is the command to install the Xcode command line tools - xcode-select -install. I'd make a junk admin user that I'll delete and use that user to install Xcode and the command line tools and then finally restore from Time Machine. If this happened to me, I'd simply change my Time Machine to exclude system files and then install a new OS onto a spare volume. This URL is fairly open (even the search engines can index it) but you might need to make a free Safari or free Mac developer account to log in and get this package.

Rather than mess with that, why not just download the stand alone installer and wait for a new version of Xcode to clean up your receipts database for you? The command line tools are installed like other OS X packages, so you may need to delete the receipt file from the receipts database (which used to be trivial since you could delete the file from /Library/Receipts but now is more complicated and needs a short article on the receipts database).

Install xcode command line