Summary
I installed Vowpal Wabbit on my Mac using the GitHub site here (and also with Homebrew when I started troubleshooting). Both installs worked, as in I was able to use the vw command and get the reply "For more information use: vw --help".
Problem
However, the utilities under 'vowpal_wabbit/utl' don't seem to work for me (e.g. -bash: vw-top-errors: command not found, -bash: vw-varinfo: command not found). I tried to solve by making an alias (alias vw=/Users/williamliu/GitHub/vowpal_wabbit/vowpalwabbit/vw), but that didn't seem to resolve the issue. I also tried to point my PATH to vowpalwabbit's utilities (export PATH=/Users/williamliu/GitHub/vowpal_wabbit/vowpalwabbit/vw:$PATH)
Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.
The reason your PATH=... setting doesn't work is you used a file-name (rather than a directory path) there.
In your particular case, the correct setting is:
export PATH=/Users/williamliu/GitHub/vowpal_wabbit/utl:$PATH
(Please make sure that this is indeed the directory where the utilities reside.)