TOPIC: MACHINE CODE
Silencing MLX warnings when running Ollama via Homebrew on macOS
15th February 2026
While there is an Ollama app on macOS, I chose to install it using Homebrew instead. That worked well enough, even if I kept seeing a warning message like this on macOS Tahoe:
WARN MLX dynamic library not available error="failed to load MLX dynamic library (searched: [/opt/homebrew/Cellar/ollama/0.16.2/bin
For some reason, the MLX integration into ollama is not what it should be, even if it runs without any other issues as things stand. While the native app does not have this issue and warnings like these can be overlooked at the operating system level, my chosen solution was to specify this alias in the .zshrc file:
alias ollama='command ollama "$@" 2> >(grep -v "MLX dynamic library not available" >&2)'
On executing this command to reload the configuration file, the output from ollama to stderr was much cleaner:
source ~/.zshrc
However, the alias itself still needs some unpacking to explain what is happening. Let us proceed piece by piece, focussing on the less obvious parts of the text within the quotes in the alias definition.
command: Starting the whole aliased statement with this keyword stops everything becoming recursive and makes everything safer, even if I have got away with doing that with the ls command elsewhere. If I were to include aliases in functions, the situation could be different, producing an infinite loop in the process.
"$@": Without this, the arguments to the ollama command would not be passed into the alias.
2>: This is the overall redirection to stderr and >(grep -v "MLX dynamic library not available" >&2) where the text removal takes place.
grep -v: Within the filtering statement, this command prints everything that does not match the search string. In this case, that is "MLX dynamic library not available" .
>&2: Here is where the output is sent back to stderr for the messages that appear in the console.
In all of this, it is important to distinguish between stderr (standard error output) and stdout (standard output). For ollama, the latter is how you receive a response from the LLM, while the former is used for application feedback. This surprised me when I first learned of it, yet it is common behaviour in the world of Linux and UNIX, which includes macOS.
This matters here because suppressing stderr means that you get no idea of how an LLM download is proceeding because that goes to that destination, rather than stdout as I might have expected without knowing better as I do now. Hence, the optimal approach is to subset the stderr output instead.