• bash

    One of my uglier scripty bits

    So – sed and awk versions on the Mac are a little behind. Turns out if I write an expression to wrap a forward slash into braces that it doesn’t exactly translate when moving from Linux to a Mac. So this happened (make fun, it’s cool): #!/bin/bash #Extracts occurances of a file path from a text file #Then sorts and counts up each echo "Please make sure to run script from same Original_file PATH" read -p "Enter filename: " original_file cp $original_file tempfile.txt && sed 's/ /\n/g' tempfile.txt > tempfile1.txt && sed -i '.bak' '/^$/d' tempfile1.txt && cat tempfile1.txt | grep '^/' | sort |uniq -c | sort -k2nr |sort…

  • Apple Configurator,  Apps,  iPhone,  Mac OS X

    Get The Title Of An App From Apple App Store URLs

    When you’re building and manipulating apps in the Apple App Stores, it helps to be able to pull and parse pieces of data. Here, we’ll look at two strategies that you can use to do so. It’s worth noting that the purpose of this was to use the URL of an app from an MDM and then be able to script updating metadata about the app, given that vendors often change names of the display name of an app (e.g. Yelp is actually called “Yelp: Discover Local Favorites on the App Store”). First, we’ll grab a URL. This one is for Self Service: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/self-service-mobile/id718509958?mt=8 If you don’t know the URL…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  precache

    One-liner To Grab Which macOS Caching Server You’re Using

    There’s a macOS tool called AssetCacheLocatorUtil located at /usr/bin/AssetCacheLocatorUtil. The output is in… stderr. Because stderr is so fun to work with (note that sed -i only works with stdin). So, to update the caching server(s) you are using and only print the IP address of those, you’d do the following: /usr/bin/AssetCacheLocatorUtil 2>&1 | grep guid | awk '{print$4}' | sed 's/^\(.*\):.*$/\1/' | uniq If you use Jamf Pro and would like to use this as an extension attribute, that’s posted here: https://github.com/krypted/cachecheck. I didn’t do any of the if/then there, as I’d usually just do that on the JSS.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Use awk to evaluate compound conditions

    You search for items in macOS using compound conditions in a number of ways. One way is with awk. Here, we’re going to grab the output of a simple ls command. That gets piped into an awk statement. Then we’re going to look at the expression to evaluate. Basically, we’re going to say anything that contains com. as well as apple and .plist. Because it’s ls, we’re looking for names of files that match those patterns. Each pattern is listed in brackets. And then there’s the {print} to lay out the action of printing to the files that match the pattern to the screen: ls |awk '/[com.][apple][.plist]/ {print}' Note: I…

  • bash,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu

    Programmatically Grab Active DNS Servers On macOS

    One of my favorite things about grabbing things with scripts is just how many ways (and sometimes how needfully or needlessly convoluted you can make them) to grab the same pieces of information. For example, something as simple as what hosts you use to resolve names on a Mac. There are a number of ways to grab what DNS server a device is using in macOS. So when you’re running a script you might choose to grab DNS information one way or another, according to what you’re after. Some of this might seem more complicated than it should be. And that’s correct… resolv.conf The /etc/resolv.conf file is updated automatically to…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Programmatically Grab The Location Of An Account

    Namespace conflicts can be interesting. Especially with multiple local domains. To grab the path of a directory domain of a currently logged in user (when running as the user) using a script, you can run the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep AppleMetaNodeLocation | awk '{print $2}' You can then replace the string we’re using with grep if you’d like to pull a different attribute from the user record, you’d use the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep UniqueID | awk '{print $2}'

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Scripted Country Geolocations Using OS X’s Built-In ip2cc

    Recently I was working on a project where we were isolating IP addresses by country. In the process, I found an easy little tool built right into OS X called ip2cc. Using ip2cc, you can lookup what country an IP is in. To do so, simply run ip2cc followed by a name or ip address. For example, to lookup apple.com you might run: ip2cc apple.com Or to lookup Much Music, you might run: ip2cc muchmusic.ca The output would be: IP::Country modules (v2.28) Copyright (c) 2002-13 Nigel Wetters Gourlay Database updated Wed May 15 15:29:48 2013 Name: muchmusic.com Address: 199.85.71.88 Country: CA (Canada) You can just get the country line: ip2cc…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Unix

    Use awk To Display Lines That Exceed A Number of Characters

    The number of characters n a line of text can be a difficult thing to calculate in a given app. If you have data in a text file, you can use awk to view the number of characters in a given line of the file. This is very helpful, for example, if you have code that you’ve put into documentation that exceeds the character maximum and therefore wraps. When going to print, you need to split these lines up. Here, we’re going to use the awk command to review all lines that exceed 56 characters: awk 'length($0) > 56' ~/Repo/Chapter1.xml