Disabling /usr/bin/svn to use brew installed svn I use Lion, and the svn /usr/bin/svn is 1.6 version. As I need to use subversion 1.7, I installed svn from brew to be installed in /usr/local/bin/svn. 

How can I disable the svn* files so that I can use svn from brew?
There is a better and safer way to specify which version of an executable you want your computer to use without having to modify the executables that came pre-installed on your Mac. It's generally not recommended to alter your default system tools in any way.

You can take advantage of the PATH environment variable, which allows you to list several directories that you want your Mac to search in when looking for executables.

In order to use the latest version of svn, or any other tool you installed  in /usr/local/bin with Homebrew (or MacPorts, manually, etc), you want to tell your Mac to first look in /usr/local/bin before it looks in the default /usr/bin. You do that by defining the PATH in your .bash_profile, which is a file that gets loaded automatically every time you open a new Terminal window.

You can write the PATH to your .bash_profile by running this one-liner from the Terminal:

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"' &gt;&gt; ~/.bash_profile


This command takes everything between the single quotes (echo) and adds it (&gt;&gt;) to a file called .bash_profile in your user’s root (or home) directory (~/).

To have these changes take effect, you can either quit and relaunch Terminal, or run this command:

source ~/.bash_profile


If you want to do it all manually, open your .bash_profile with your favorite editor, then add this line to it:

PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH"


and save it. Then quit and relaunch Terminal.