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…
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Quick and dirty: Pull a list of all filevault encrypted users on a Mac
In the following example script, I’m going to pull a list of just the usernames from fdesetup. sudo fdesetup list The output would be as follows: charlesedge,F4D8B61D-1234-1234-98F4-103470EE1234 emerald,2E1203EA-1234-4E0D-1234-717D27221234 admin,50058FCF-88DF-1234-1234-91FCF28C0488 I’ll then pipe them into sed and use the , as a delimiter, pulling * or everything before it: sudo fdesetup list | sed 's;,.*;;' As follows: charlesedge emerald admin
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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.
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Use the Jamf Classic API to Extract Device Counts
You can leverage the API built into the Casper Suite to do lots and lots of cool stuff, without interacting directly with the database. Here, I’ll use a simple curl command in a bash script that has myuser as the username for a server and mypassword as the password. The server is myserver.jamfcloud.com. Basically, we’re going to ask the computers and mobiledevices tables for all their datas. Once we have that, we’ll constrain the output to just the size attribute for each using sed: curl -s -u myuser:mypassword https://myserver.jamfcloud.com/JSSResource/computers | sed -n -e 's/.*<size>\(.*\)<\/size>.*/\1/p' curl -s -u myuser:mypassword https://myserver.jamfcloud.com/JSSResource/mobiledevices | sed -n -e 's/.*<size>\(.*\)<\/size>.*/\1/p' This same logic can then be applied…
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Remove Empty Lines From A File
The following command will remove all empty lines from a file called badcommand.sh: sed '/^$/d' badcommand.sh
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Quick & Dirty sed Find/Replace
I find a very common task that I need to do is find a string in a file and replace it with another string. Or better, find all instances of a given string and replace them with a new string. I figure others will need to do this as well. This is also an interesting example of how Mac OS X is not “the same” as Linux. The sed command can be used to quickly perform a find and replace inside of a file. The following example will use the -i option to do so in-place, defining no extensions to -i using the double quotes (“”), then using the /s…
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One More Character In Serials
Yesterday I showed a way to get the serial number from a Mac OS X machine. However, as a couple of people pointed out, Apple will soon be adding another character to the serial number. This means that rather than use cut I should have used awk to allow for either serial number length. To grab the serial this way: ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber | awk ‘{print $4}’ Or without the quotes: ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber | awk ‘{print $4}’ | sed ‘s/”//g’
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Using the cut Command
A number of commands available for finding positions that you want in a line and extracting only a certain amount of text can be pretty cumbersome in terms of learning curve. This isn’t to say that once you get the hang of them that they’re terribly complicated but it can take a little while to get the hang of them. And when you need something fast, you might want an easy command for extracting text from lines. In these cases, consider cut. The cut command doesn’t do regular expressions (I guess you could argue that its ability to use a delimiter can be used as a regular expression) and so…
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Add a comma to the end of every line of a file in bash
Add a comma to the end of every line of a file in bash: sed 's/$/,/'