Downloading binary Homebrew bottles without installing Homebrew can be useful to check the location of the bottle contents. This is useful when developing Meson native-files or CMake Find*.cmake modules.

Homebrew distributes bottles from GitHub Packages. For example, HDF5 binary “bottle” may be inspected by:

tar --list -f <filename>

No Homebrew install is necessary for inspection. Using the libraries and binaries is best done by installing Homebrew.