How to Install Telnet on Your Mac

These are instructions on how to install Telnet on your Mac. We'll be using macOS Big Sur for this tutorial but the procedure is the same for other versions of macOS.

Step One
Launch Terminal from Applications > Utilities folder.


Step Two
Install Homebrew by entering the following command into the Terminal window:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"


Input your administrative password when prompted


Press RETURN to begin installation


On a Mac with Apple silicon, Homebrew installs into /opt/homebrew and finishes by printing Next steps: commands that add Homebrew to your PATH. Run them, or Terminal answers command not found: brew in the next step. For Terminal's default shell, they are:




echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> ~/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

**If you already have Homebrew installed, use the command "brew update" instead. This command may take some time to run.


Step Three
Once Homebrew is installed, you can install telnet using the following command:

brew install telnet


Step Four
You can now use telnet directly from Terminal. For example, telnet [ip address]. More details on how use to use telnet can be found by entering man telnet.