Redirection | Technology Tales

Silencing MLX warnings when running Ollama via Homebrew on macOS

15^th 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.

Redirecting a WordPress site to its home page when its loop finds no posts

5^th November 2022

Since I created a bespoke theme for this site, I have been tweaking things as I go. The basis came from the WordPress Theme Developer Handbook, which gave me a simpler starting point shorn of all sorts of complexity that is encountered with other themes. Naturally, this means that there are little rough edges that need tidying over time.

One of these is dealing with errors on the site, like when content is not found. This could be a wrong address or a search query that finds no matching posts. When that happens, there is a redirection to the home page using some simple JavaScript within the loop fallback code enclosed within script start and end tags (including the whole code triggers the action from this post so it cannot be shown here):

location.href="[blog home page ]";

The bloginfo function can be used with the url keyword to find the home page, avoiding hard-coding. For now, this works so long as JavaScript is enabled, but a more robust approach may come in time. It is not possible to do a PHP redirect because of the nature of HTTP: when headers have been sent, it is not possible to do server redirects. At this stage, things become client side, so using JavaScript is one way to go instead.

Using SAS FILENAME statement to extract directory file listings into SAS

30^th May 2007

The filename statement's pipe option allows you to direct the output of operating system commands into SAS for further processing. Usefully, the Windows dir command (with its /s switch) and the UNIX and Linux equivalent ls allow you to get a file listing into SAS. For example, here's how you extract the list of files in your UNIX or Linux home directory into SAS:

filename dirlist pipe 'ls ~';
data dirlist;
    length filename $200;
    infile dirlist length=reclen;
    input buffer $varying200. reclen;
run;

Using the ftp option on the filename statement allows you to get a list of the files in a directory on a remote server, even one with a different operating system to that used on the client (PC or server), very useful for cases where cross-platform systems are involved. Here's some example code:

filename dirlist ftp ' ' ls user='user' host='host' prompt;
data _null_;
    length filename $200;
    infile dirlist length=reclen;
    input buffer $varying200. reclen;
run;

The PROMPT option will cause SAS to ask you for a password, and the null string is where you would otherwise specify the name of a file.