On May 6, 2026, at 14:56, Fred Wright wrote: > On Wed, 6 May 2026, Giuseppe Miceli wrote: > >> ferdy@kamikaze:~$ sudo port -svpf selfupdate && port outdated > [...] > > It's doing exactly what you told it to do with -f. > > Also note: > > -s is a NOP on selfupdate, since it (unfortunately) always builds from source. > > -p is probably a NOP, since AFAIK, selfupdate is treated as a single > operation.
Although Fred is right that -s and -p do nothing for selfupdate and -f intentionally causes the symptom you're reporting, it should also be noted that you're not expected to need to use most of these flags regularly or at all when installing or upgrading ports either and some of them may be harmful. The -p flag proceeds past a build failure and continues to build other ports, even if they depend on the failing port. If so, and if you already have an older version of the failing dependency installed, it'll use that. Depending on why the dependency was updated, this may result in the other port build failing (or worse, building without error but being subtly incorrect). You should only use this flag if you are certain that the changes in the dependency are not significant to the other port. This is not information we expect most users to know since it could take a lot of investigation to find out, so most users should not use this option. The -f flag forces overwriting files that already existed that MacPorts didn't know about, but that shouldn't happen, and if it does you'd want to investigate why those files were there before blasting past it. The -s flag forces a port to build from source rather than download a binary. Ordinarily you would only do this if you were diagnosing a port problem. If you always want to build ports from source on principle, you can set "buildfromsource always" in macports.conf. The -v flag produces verbose output and this (or the -d flag for even more debug output) are fine to use if you want that much info in your terminal. You can also see this information later in the port's log file, unless the build was successful and MacPorts was configured (as it is by default) to delete logs on successful builds.
