Ok, I was suspecting that was the case with the end-of-line characters.
It's possible that an older version had a sly bug in it-- I never really know what the Version numbers mean, the build date is the more useful measure.
You can equivalently do either of your suggested means to update-- '@update.afni.binaries' will get you the latest AFNI software.
Version of Mac shouldn't affect performance. In happier times, my Mac was on 10.6.8. Now in the dark ages of Mavericks, I'm much less happy with things. But AFNI results should be independent of OS.
Please let me know how things go after the update-- hopefully that will sort this out, since the command seems to work on the Demo set.
--pt