Armin Briegel
I have been working with Macs and other Apple devices for over twenty-five years and probably held most existing technical job titles at one time or another. I worked for nearly ten years at Apple Germany and US as a Systems Engineer, Consulting Engineer, and Solutions Architect.
Then I worked for five years as System Administrator at University of Southern California where I had to put Mac management theory in to practice with Jamf Casper, Munki, and many, many custom scripts and packages.
We recently moved back to Europe which gives me an opportunity to ponder my career, the present and future of Mac management, and write about all of it.
Books
I have written five books for Apple Administrators:
- macOS Installation for Apple Administrators
- Packaging for Apple Administrators
- Property Lists, Preferences and Profiles for Apple Administrators
- Moving to zsh
- macOS Terminal and Shell
Presentations
I regularly give presentations on topics relevant to Apple Administration and Scripting at conferences and meeting. Some are available online:
- Mac Manager Meeting, Marriot Library of the University of Utah, January 2017, “Packaging”
- MacSysAdmin, Göteborg, October 2017, “Scripting Bash”
- MacAD.UK, London, February 2018, “Terminal Wizardry and Witchcraft”
- MacSysAdmin, Göteborg, October 2018, “Swift for Apple Admins”
- MacAD.UK, London, March 2019, “Modern Deployment Workflows for Business”
- MacSysAdmin, Göteborg, October 2019, “Moving to zsh”
- Texas Apple Admins Virtual, May 2020, “Obscure Terminal Features”
- PSU Mac Admins Conference, Campfire Session, May 2020, “Moving to zsh”
- Virtual JNUC 2020, October 2020, “Scripting Jamf Pro”
- MacSysAdmin Online 2020, October 2020, “Practical Scripting”
- MacDeployment 2021, June 2021, “An Online Presentation on Presenting Online“
- MacDevOps YVR 2021, June 2021, “The Encyclopedia of Packages“
- MacSysAdmin Online 2021, October 2021, “Let’s Swift Again“
- Virtual JNUC 2021, October 2021, “Automating Installations with Installomator“
Podcasts
I have had the honor of being on several podcasts:
- MacAdmins Podcast, Episode 33, April 2017
- MacAD.UK Speaker Interview (Jan 2018): Want to write a book? Armin Briegel Talks Self Publishing macOS and iBooks
- MacAdmins Podcast, Episode 102 – Erase All the Things
- CommandControlPower, Episode 342, Jan 2020
- MacAdmins Podcast, Episode 206 – What are you doing with your COVID time? Writing books I see!
- MacAdmin Monthly: 2021-03-09
- CommandControlPower Podcast, March 2021, Episode 406
- MacDevOps YVR Podcast: 2021-05-18 with Csaba Fitzl
- Jamf After Dark: All About Scripting with Armin Briegel, March 2022
- MacDevOps YVR Podcast: 2022 Speaker Series
My sincere congratulations for your work.
Hi,
You have a lot of useful stuff here and in your gists on github but what are the license terms if any?
If it exactly possible for your audience to legally use this information without getting sued if you, or your heirs, go nuts in the future?
I have found your posts so helpful and well written (despite the few typos) that I have bought the book as a thank you. I don’t particularly want this comment to be public but I do want you to receive the thanks.
Hi, nobody can answer this, so here’s hoping you can.
I can’t figure out how to replace a data value in a plist file from terminal.
I started with defaults write, but that’s a fail, because it cannot go more than one level deep (sub-key).
Now, I have been trying for days to use PlistBuddy, but no luck. It cannot write the data as-is, without masking it.
The value is already in the plist file, so I want to use it as-is, and just chance 1 character.
Can you please look at my post and see if you can help?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62080134/how-do-you-enter-data-in-plistbuddy
I am pretty frustrated, and to the point of thinking about getting sloppy, and just using awk.
thanks
I have been using `scout` for tasks like this: Use scout to read Property Lists
I’m new to zsh and your site has helped a lot. Thank you.
Greetings Armin,
I think maybe you need to add your zsh book to the list above on your “About the Author” page? I splurged for Father’s Day and bought all of your other books (I already had the zsh one) from Apple Books, so now I have a full Briegel library!
Hi,
The zsh setup series purely for Mac users are really appreciated.
Nowadays, the network is fast and convenient, but the information is less explicit for small group of users like Mac lovers.
Look forward for more articles~
Hi Armin, I’m interested in your last book “MacOS Terminal and shell”: please let me know if it is for neewbie, intermediate or expert users (I’m not so beginner); we could see the book’s index? Thanks a lot
The book assumes no or little prior knowledge. You can find a description and the table of contents here https://scriptingosx.com/mac0s-terminal-and-shell/
Hi Armin, I learned from your site, that it’s possible to create macOS app bundles, which only consist of a simple bash script plus an optional icon. Very convenient trick I must say! This worked like a charm on my Intel iMac and the latest Monterey macOS. On my M1 MacBook Air on the other hand, the same app bundle won’t launch. I’m asked to install Rosetta by the OS instead, which is odd, since there is only a text script inside the bundle and no binary.
Do you happen to know if this is a known limitation of Apple Silicon Macs?
Yes, this trick does not work any on Apple Silicon. Binaries are verified differently on Apple Silicon which makes this hack defunct. Alternatively you can create an AppleScript Applet or Shortcut that launches the shell script.