Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure

Simple Preflight and Sanity Checking in Scripts

I was recently building some preflight scripts and was looking to record some information about a machine live, before proceeding with a script. I found the cheapest way to determine information about architectures and chipsets when scripting preflight scripts for OS X to be the arch and machine commands respectively. For example, to verify the architecture is i386, use the arch command with no options:

/usr/bin/arch

Which simply outputs “i386”:

i386

To check the machine type, simply use the machine command:

/usr/bin/machine

Which outputs as follows:

x86_64h