While I have used this for a long time, the limited number of colors has always annoyed me. And with the introduction of Dark Mode in macOS it seemed just not useful anymore.
Mike’s approach to create the color files with a python script sent me down a rabbit hole to recreate this in Swift. I actually succeeded in creating such a Swift tool, but then, when I worked on connecting the tool with Terminal, I found an even simpler, and arguably better way to do this.
Surprisingly, it involved AppleScript.
Changing the Terminal Background color
Terminal has a powerful AppleScript library, which allows to read and change (among other things) the background color of a Terminal window or tab:
tell application "Terminal"
get background color of selected tab of window 1
--> {65535, 65533, 65534}
end tell
The background color is returned as a list of three RGB numbers ranging from 0 to 65535 (216 – 1). You can also set the background color:
tell application "Terminal"
set background color of selected tab of window 1 to {60000, 45000, 45000}
end tell
This will set the background color of the current window to pastel pink (salmon?).
Armed with this knowledge it is fairly straight forward to write a script that will set the background color to a random color:
#!/usr/bin/osascript
on backgroundcolor()
set maxValue to (2 ^ 16) - 1
set redValue to random number from 0 to maxValue
set greenValue to random number from 0 to maxValue
set blueValue to random number from 0 to maxValue
return {redValue, greenValue, blueValue}
end backgroundcolor
set newcolor to backgroundcolor()
tell application "Terminal"
set the background color of the selected tab of window 1 to newcolor
end tell
You can paste this code in Script Editor and hit the ‘play’ button and watch the Terminal window change. But since we want to use from within Terminal, we will take a different approach: paste the code into your favorite text editor and save it as a text file named randombackground (no extension).
Then open Terminal and change directory to where you save the file and set its executable bit:
> chmod +x randombackground
Now you can run this AppleScript file like any other script file from Terminal:
> ./randombackground
This is fun!
I am not the first to discover and use this, Daniel Jalkut and Erik Barzeski have documented this in 2006.
Enter Dark Mode
Fast forward back to 2018: Along with the rest of macOS, Terminal gained “Dark Mode” in macOS Mojave.
The default “Basic” window profile in Terminal has black text on a white background in light mode and white text on a black background in dark mode. There is some “magic” that happens when the system switches to Dark or Light mode.
However, once we customize the background color (or any other color) the magic does not work any more. When our random backgrounds are too dark in light mode (or vice versa), they don’t really look nice any more, and the text becomes hard to read or completely illegible.
So, we want to change the script to detect dark or light mode and limit the colors accordingly. You can detect dark mode in AppleScript with:
tell application "System Events"
get dark mode of appearance preferences
end tell
This will return true for dark mode and false for light mode. We modify the script to use just a subrange of all available colors, depending on the mode:
#!/usr/bin/osascript
on backgroundcolor()
set maxValue to (2 ^ 16) - 1
tell application "System Events"
set mode to dark mode of appearance preferences
end tell
if mode then
set rangestart to 0
set rangeend to (maxValue * 0.4)
else
set rangestart to (maxValue * 0.6)
set rangeend to maxValue
end if
set redValue to random number from rangestart to rangeend
set greenValue to random number from rangestart to rangeend
set blueValue to random number from rangestart to rangeend
return {redValue, greenValue, blueValue}
end backgroundcolor
set newcolor to backgroundcolor()
tell application "Terminal"
set the background color of the selected tab of window 1 to newcolor
end tell
When you run this from Terminal for the first time, it may prompt you to allow access to send events to “System Events.” Click ‘OK’ to confirm that:
Automatically setting the background color
Now we can randomize the color by running the command. For simplicity, you may want to put the script file somewhere in your PATH. I put mine in ~/bin/, a folder which a few useful tools and I also added to my PATH(in bash and in zsh).
It is still annoying that it doesn’t happen automatically when we create a new window or tab, but that is exactly what the shell configuration files are for. Add this code to your bash or zsh configuration file.
# random background color
if [[ $TERM_PROGRAM == "Apple_Terminal" ]]; then
if [[ -x ~/bin/randombackground ]]; then
~/bin/randombackground
fi
fi
Our script will likely fail when the shell is run in any other terminal application or context (such as over ssh). The first if clause checks if the shell is running in Terminal.app. Then the code check to see if the script exists and is executable, and then it executes the script.
This will result in random Terminal colors, matching your choice of dark or light mode.
Note: macOS Catalina added the option to automatically switch the theme depending on the time of day. This script will detect the mode correctly when creating a new window, but Terminal windows and tabs that are already open will retain their color. I am working on a solution…
String comparison in most programming languages is case-sensitive. That means that the string 'A' and 'a' are considered different. Humans usually don’t think that way, so there is bound to be trouble and confusion.
If you are looking at single letters, the bracket expansion can be quite useful:
case $input in
[aA])
# handle 'a'
;;
[bB])
# handle 'b'
;;
[qQ])
# handle 'q': quit
exit 0
;;
*)
echo "Option is not available. Please try again"
;;
esac
However, for longer strings the bracket expansion gets cumbersome. To cover all case combinations of the word cat you need [cC][aA][tT]. For longer, or unknown strings, it is easier to convert a string to uppercase (all capitals) or lower case before comparing.
sh and bash3
Bash3 and sh have no built-in means to convert case of a string, but you can use the tr tool:
name="John Doe"
# sh
echo $(echo "$name" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' )
john doe
# bash3
echo $(tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' <<< "$name")
john doe
Switch the [:upper:] and [:lower:] arguments to convert to upper case.
There are many other tools available that can provide this functionality, such as awk or sed.
Bash 5
Bash 5 has a special parameter expansion for upper- and lowercasing strings:
name="John Doe"
echo ${name,,}
john doe
echo ${name^^}
JOHN DOE
% name="John Doe"
% echo ${(L)name}
john doe
% echo ${(U)name}
JOHN DOE
In zsh you can even declare a variable as inherently lower case or upper case. This will not affect the contents of the variable, but it will automatically be lower- or uppercased on expansion:
% typeset -l name
% name="John Doe"
% echo $name
john doe
% typeset -u name
% echo $name
JOHN DOE
Another excerpt from the book “Moving to zsh.” I found this one so useful, I thought I’d like to share it.
You can get the version of zsh with the ZSH_VERSION variable:
% echo $ZSH_VERSION
5.7.1
And you can get the version of macOS with the sw_vers command:
% sw_vers -productVersion
10.15.1
Comparing version strings is usually fraught with potential errors. Strings are compared by the character code for each character.‘2’ is alphabetically greater than ‘10’ when compared as strings, because the character code for 2 is greater than the character code for 1. So, a string comparison of macOS version numbers will return that 10.9.5 is greater than 10.15.1.
Zsh, however, provides a function is-at-least which helps with version string comparisons.
With a single argument, is-at-least will return if the current zsh version matches or is higher than a given number:
if ! is-at-least 2.6-17; then
echo "is-at-least is not available"
fi
When you provide two arguments to is-at-least, then the second argument is compared (using version string rules) with the first and needs to match or be higher:
autoload is-at-least
if is-at-least 10.9 $(sw_vers -productVersion); then
echo "can run Catalina installer"
else
echo "cannot run Catalina installer"
fi
Note: when used in a script, you will probably have to autoload is-at-least before using it. In an interactive shell, it is often already loaded, because many other autoloader functions will have already loaded it.
Ironically, macOS can unarchive xz archives when you double click them in the Finder, but there is no command line tool on macOS to unarchive them. In the previous post, I ran into the same problem, and there you can find instructions on how to install the xz tools on macOS.
Update 2020-03-26: I was unnecessarily complicating this. You can use tar to unarchive this:
tar -xf shellcheck-latest.darwin.x86_64.tar.xz
After downloading and un-archiving, you can manually move the shellcheck binary to a suitable directory. The standard location is /usr/local/bin.
For manual installations, this is it! Much simpler than before. Thank you!
Note: if you want the man page as well, you still need to build it with pandoc from the source.
Build a pkg for managed deployment
If you are a MacAdmin and want to distribute shellcheck with your management system, you will need to build an installer package (pkg).
Instead of copying the binary to /usr/local/bin, place it in a payload folder in a project folder. Then build the pkg with pkgbuild:
And because all of this isn’t really that difficult, I built autopkg recipes for Shellcheck You can find them in my recipe repository or with autopkg search shellcheck. Enjoy!
This is an excerpt from my book “Moving to zsh” which is available for order on the Apple Books Store.
One of the advantages of zsh over bash 3 is the support of “associative arrays,” a data structure known as hash tables or dictionaries in other languages.
In associative arrays, you can store a piece of data, or value with an identifying ‘key’. For example, the associative array userinfo has multiple values, each identified with a key:
In zsh, before you can use a variable as an associative array, you have to declare it as one with
declare -A userinfo
This will tell the shell that the userinfo variable is an associative array. You can also use typeset -A as an alternative syntax. You can verify the type of the variable:
% echo ${(t)userinfo}
association
You can then set the key-value pairs of the userinfo associative array individually:
Setting the values for each key is useful in some situations, but can be tedious. You can also set the entire associative array at once. There are two syntaxes for this in zsh:
userinfo=( name armin shell zsh website scriptingosx.com )
This format follows the format ( key1 value1 key2 value2 ...). The other syntax is more verbose and expressive:
When you set the associative array variable this way, you are overwriting the entire array. For example, if you set the userinfo for ‘armin’ like above and then set it later like this, the website key and value pair will have been overwritten as well:
% userinfo=( [name]=beth [shell]=zsh )
% if [[ -z $userinfo[website] ]]; then echo no value; fi
no value
If you want to partially overwrite an existing associative array, while leaving the other key/value pairs intact, you can use the += operator:
You can also use this to loop through all the keys and values of an associated array:
for key value in ${(kv)userinfo}; do
echo "$key -> $value"
done
#output
website -> fishshell.com
shell -> fish
name -> beth
Limitations
Associative arrays have their uses, but are not as powerful as dictionaries in more powerful languages. In zsh, you cannot nest associative arrays in normal arrays, which limits their use for complex data structures.
There is also no functionality to transfer certain file formats, like XML or property lists directly in to associative arrays or back.
Shell scripting was never designed for complex data structures. When you encounter these limitations, you should move “up” to a higher level language, such as Python or Swift.
During my testing in the Catalina beta version I was able to download 10.15, 10.14.6, 10.14.5, and 10.13.6. I was not able to test if 10.13.6 would download the hardware specific build of 10.13.6 for the 2018 MacBook Pro, since I do not have that hardware.
I would assume that downloading an Installer application for a macOS version that is not supported on the hardware you are running the command on would fail. (Again I did not have such hardware available for testing.)
So far the only way to download the macOS Installer in some automated fashion was using Greg Neagle’s installinstallmacos.py script. That script still has some abilities that do not seem to be available to the softwareupdate command, but it is good to see Apple accepting the need for this kind of workflow.
That post contains an example adapted from the ‘Pro git’ documentation which shows how to display the current branch and repo in the prompt.
Personally, I don’t like the Terminal window to be cluttered up with repeated information. While the information from the git repository does change over time, it does not change that frequently, and the information gets repeated over and over.
While I was researching the last post, which describes how to display the current working directory in Terminal’s window title bar, I learnt that you can also set a window title using a different escape code.
So, instead of repeating the git information on every prompt, we can show it in the window or tab title bar.
You can find the code to set this up in my dotfiles repository on Github. To use it make sure the git_vcs_setup file is in your fpath and load it in your .zshrc with
# Git status
autoload -U git_vcs_setup && git_vcs_setup
Note that this file sets up two functions: update_terminal_window_title and update_terminal_tab_title. Terminal can have separate information titles for tabs and the entire window. When there are no tabs (or technically, just a single tab) Terminal displays both titles.
The status info above will show the repository, the current branch, a U when there are unstaged changes, and a S when there are staged, but uncommitted changes.
If you want more details in the status, you might want to consider using a more powerful solution to retrieve the git status, such as this project.
While I was working on customizing my zsh configuration files for my zsh article series, I noticed that Terminal would not display the current working directory when using zsh. it worked fine when I switched back to bash.
Note: showing the working directory in the window or tab title is enabled by default in Terminal. You can configure what Terminal shows in the title in the Preferences Window for each profile. Select a profile and
Some sleuthing showed me that /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal sets up a update_terminal_cwd function which sends some escape codes to Terminal to keep the window title bar updated. This file is sourced by /etc/bashrc for the Terminal.app.
In macOS 10.14 Mojave and earlier, this configuration file has no equivalent for zsh. /etc/zshrc has code that would load /etc/zshrc_Apple_Terminal, if it existed. However, this file does not exist in macOS Mojave and earlier.
It does in Catalina, though, and it sets up a similar function that is added into the precmd hook. If you have access to the Catalina beta, you can just copy the /etc/zshrc_Apple_Terminal to your Mojave (or earlier) Mac and it will work.
Alternatively, you can write your own implementation, which is what I did, because I wanted it before the Catalina files existed. My solution exists of the function and its setup in its own file. This file is in a directory that is added to the fpath so I can simply load it with autoload.
# path to my zsh functions folder:
my_zsh_functions=$repo_dir/dotfiles/zshfunctions/
# include my zshfunctions dir in fpath:
if [[ -d $my_zsh_functions ]]; then
fpath=( $my_zsh_functions $fpath )
fi
# only for Mojave and earlier
if [[ $(sw_vers -buildVersion) < "19" ]]; then
# this sets up the connection with the Apple Terminal Title Bar
autoload -U update_terminal_pwd && update_terminal_pwd
fi
And from now, the title will be updated in Mojave (and earlier) and the function won’t even be loaded in Catalina.
This might seem a bit overkill, now that the functionality is in the Catalina file, but it might serve as a useful example when you want to customize, or re-implement similar behavior.
The upcoming macOS 10.15 Catalina will require more apps and tools to be notarized. Apple has somewhat loosened the requirements at last minute, but these changed limitations are only temporary, to give developers more time to adapt.
Notarizing Mac Application bundles has its pitfalls, but is overall fairly well documented. However, I have been working on some command line tools written in Swift 5 and figured out how to get those properly signed and notarized.
Howard Oakley has written up his experiences and that post was extremely helpful. But there were a few omissions and some steps that aren’t really necessary, so I decided to make my own write-up.
And yes, there is a script at the end…
Note: these instructions are for macOS 10.14.6 Mojave, Xcode 10.3 and Swift 5.0. It is very likely that the details will change over time.
Update 2019-09-24: Tested with Xcode 11 and it still works (the screen layout has changed for some of the options)
What do you need?
Apple Developer Account (Personal or Enterprise, the free account does not provide the right certificates)
Xcode 10.3 or 11
Developer ID Certificates (Application and Install)
Application Specific Password for your Developer account
a Command Line Tool Project that you want to sign and notarize
That’s a longish list. If you are already building command line tools in Xcode, you should have most of these covered already. We will walk through the list step-by-step:
You cannot get the required certificates with a free Apple Developer account, unless you are member of a team that provides access.
Xcode
You can download Xcode from the Mac App Store or the developer download page. When you launch Xcode for the first time, it will prompt for some extra installations. Those are necessary for everything to in the article to work.
Developer ID Certificates
There are multiple certificates you can get from the Developer Program. By default you get a ‘Mac Developer’ certificate, which you can use for building and testing your own app locally.
To distribute binaries (apps and command line tools) outside of the App Store, you need a ‘Developer ID Application’ certificate. To sign installer packages for distribution outside of the Mac App Store, you need a ‘Developer ID Installer’ certificate.
We will need both types of Developer ID certificates, the first to sign the command line tool and the second to sign and notarize the installer package.
If you have not created these yet, you can do so in Xcode or in the Developer Portal. If you already have the certificates but on a different Mac, you need to export them and re-import them on the new Mac. Creating new certificates might invalidate the existing certificates! So beware.
Once you have created or imported the certificates on your work machine, you can verify their presence in the Terminal with:
% security find-identity -p basic -v
This command will list all available certificates on this Mac. Check that you can see the ‘Developer ID Application’ and ‘Developer ID Installer’ certificates. If you are a member of multiple teams, you may see multiple certificates for each team.
You can later identify the certificates (or ‘identities’) by the long hex number or by the descriptive name, e.g. "Developer ID Installer: Armin Briegel (ABCD123456)"
The ten character code at the end of the name is your Developer Team ID. Make a note of it. If you are a member of multiple developer teams, you can have multiple Developer ID certificates and the team ID will help you distinguish them.
Application Specific Password for your Developer Account
Apple requires Developer Accounts to be protected with two-factor authentication. To allow automated workflows which require authentication, you can create application specific passwords.
Create a new application specific password in Apple ID portal for your developer account.
You will only be shown the password when you create it. Immediately create a ‘New Password Item’ in your Keychain with the following fields:
Keychain Item Name: Developer-altool
Account Name: your developer account email
Password: the application-specific password you just created
This will create a developer specific password item that we can access safely from the tools.
If you want, you can also store the app specific password in a different password manager, but the Xcode tools have a special option to use Keychain.
A Command Line Tool Project
You may already have a project to create a command line in Xcode. If you don’t have one, or just want a new one to experiment, you can just create a new project in Xcode and choose the ‘Command Line Tool’ template from ‘macOS’ section in the picker. The template creates a simple “Hello, world” tool, which you can use to test the notarization process.
My sample project for this article will be named “hello.”
Preparing the Xcode Project
The default settings in the ‘Command Line Tool’ project are suitable for building and testing the tool on your Mac, but need some changes to create a distributable tool.
Choosing the proper signing certificates
Before you can notarize the command line tool, it needs to be signed with the correct certificates.
in Xcode, select the blue project icon in the left sidebar
select the black “terminal” icon with your project’s name under the “Targets” list entry
make sure the ‘General’ tab is selected
under ‘Signing’ disable ‘Automatically manage signing’
under ‘Signing (Debug)’ choose your Team and choose ‘Developer ID Application’ as the certificate
under ‘Signing (Release)’ choose your Team and choose ‘Developer ID Application’ as the certificate
Setting the certificates
Enable Hardened Runtime
Enabling the ‘Hardened Runtime’ will compile the binary in a way that makes it harder for external process to inject code. This will be requirement for successful notarization starting January 2020.
from the view where you changed the signing options, click on ‘Build Settings’ in the upper tab row
click on ‘All’ to show all available settings
enter ‘enable hardened’ in the search field, this will show the ‘Enable Hardened Runtime’ setting
set the value in the project column (blue icon) to YES
Enable Hardened Runtime
Change the Install Build Location
If we want to automate the packaging and notarization, we need to know where Xcode builds the binary. The default location is in some /tmp subdirectory and not very convenient. We will change the location for the final binary (the ‘product’) to the build subdirectory in the project folder:
in the same view as above, enter ‘Installation Build’ in the search field, this will show the ‘Installation Build Products Location’ setting
double click on the value in the Project column (blue icon), this will open a popup window
change the value to $SRCROOT/build/pkgroot
Change the Installation Build location
If you manage your code in git or another VCS, you want to add the build subdirectory to the ignored locations (.gitignore)
Build the Binary
You can use Xcode to write, test, and command line tool debug your. When you are ready to build and notarize a pkg installer, do the following:
open Terminal and change directory to the project folder
% xcodebuild clean install
This will spew a lot of information out to the command line. You will see a build subdirectory appear in the project folder, which will be filled with some directories with intermediate data.
After a successful build you should see a pkgroot directory in the build folder, which contains your binary in the usr/local/bin sub-path.
/usr/local/bin is the default location for command line tools in the Command Line Tool project template. It suits me fine most of the time, but you can change it by modifying the ‘Installation Directory’ build setting in Xcode and re-building from the command line.
Build the pkg
Command Line Tools can be signed, but not directly notarized. You can however notarize a zip, dmg, or pkg file containing a Command Line Tool. Also, it is much easier for users and administrators to install your tool when it comes in a proper installation package.
We can use the pkgroot directory as our payload to build the installer package:
I have broken the command into multiple lines for clarity, you can enter the command in one line without the end-of-line backslashes \. You want to replace the values for the identifier, version and signing certificate with your data.
This will build an installer package which would install your binary on the target system. You should inspect the pkg file with Pacifist or Suspicious Package and do a test install on a test system to verify everything works.
If you want to learn more about installer packages and pkgbuild read my book “Packaging for Apple Administrators.”
Notarizing the Installer Package
Xcode has a command line tool altool which you can use to upload your tool for notarization:
The asc-provider is your ten digit Team ID. If you are only a member in a single team you do not need to provide this.
The password uses a special @keychain: keyword that tells altool to get the app-specific password out of a keychain item named Developer-altool. (Remember we created that earlier?)
This will take a while. When the command has successfully uploaded the pkg to Apple’s Notarization Servers, it will return a RequestUUID. Your notarization request will be queued and eventually processed. You can check the status of your request with:
Apple will also send an email to your developer account when the process is complete. I my experience this rarely takes more than a minute or two. (Being in Central EU time zone might be an advantage there). When the process is complete, you can run the above notarization-info command to get some details. The info will include a link that contains even more information, which can be useful when your request is rejected.
Note that the info links expire after 24 hours or so. You should copy down any information you want to keep longer.
Completing the Process
You will not receive anything back from Apple other than the confirmation or rejection of your request. When a Mac downloads your installer package and verifies its notarization status it will reach out to Apple’s Notarization servers and they will confirm or reject the status.
If the Mac is offline at this time, or behind a proxy or firewall that blocks access to the Apple Servers, then it cannot verify whether your pkg file is notarized.
You can, however, ‘staple’ the notarization ticket to the pkg file, so the clients do not need to connect to the servers:
% xcrun stapler staple build/hello-1.0.pkg
You can also use stapler to verify the process went well:
% xcrun stapler validate build/hello-1.0.pkg
But since stapler depends on the developer tools to be installed, you should generally prefer spctl to check notarization:
Obviously, I built a script to automate all this. Put the following script in the root of the project folder, modify the variables at the start of the script (lines 20–38) with your information, and run it.
The script will build the tool, create a signed pkg, upload it for notarization, wait for the result, and then staple the pkg.
You can use this script as an external build tool target in Xcode. There are other ways to integrate scripts for automation in Xcode, but all of this is a new area for me and I am unsure which option is the best, and which I should recommend.
Links and Videos
These links and videos, especially Howard Oakley’s post and Tom Bridge’s PSU Presentation have been hugely helpful. Also thanks to co-worker Arnold for showing me this was even possible.
Notarization is a key part of Apple’s security strategy going in macOS.
As MacAdmins we will usually deploy software through management systems, where the Gatekeeper mechanisms which evaluate notarization are bypassed. There are, however, already special cases (Kernel Extensions) where notarization is mandatory. It is likely that Apple will continue to tighten these requirements in the future. The macOS Mojave 10.14.5 update has shown that Apple may not even wait for major releases to increase the requirements.
If you are building your own tools and software for macOS and plan to distribute the software to other computers, you should start signing and notarizing.
On the other hand, I find the introduction of Notarization to macOS encouraging. If Apple wanted to turn macOS into a “App Store only system” like iOS, they would not have needed to build the notarization process and infrastructure. Instead, Apple seems to have embraced third-party-software from outside the App Store.
Notarization allows Apple to provide a security mechanism for software distributed through other means. It cannot be 100% effective, but when used correctly by Apple and the software developers it will provide a level of validation and trust for software downloaded from the internet.
The release notes for Catalina also tell us that other built-in scripting runtimes, namely Python, Perl, and Ruby. Will not be included in future macOS releases (post-Catalina) any more.
This means, that if you want to use bash, Python, Perl, or Ruby on macOS, you will have to install, and maintain your own version in the future.
However, scripts in installation packages, cannot rely on any of these interpreters being available in future, post-Catalina versions of macOS. Installer pkgs can be run in all kinds of environments and at all times, and you would not want them to fail, because a dependency is missing.
The good news is that we still have time. All the runtimes mentioned above are still present in Catalina, so the packages will continue to work for now. But if you are building installation scripts, you need to check if any of the installation scripts use one of these interpreters and fix them.
I recommend to use /bin/sh for installation scripts, since that will run in any macOS context, even the Recovery system.
If you are using third-party installer packages, you may also want to check them for these interpreters, and notify the developer that these packages will break in future versions of macOS.
To check a flat installer package, you would expand it with pkgutil --expand and then look at script files in the Scripts folder. This will work fine for a package or two, but gets tedious really quickly, especially with large distribution pkgs with many components (e.g. Office).
So… I wrote a script to do it. The script should handle normal component pkgs, distribution pkgs and the legacy bundle pkgs and mpkgs.
Once I had written the code to inspect all these types of pkgs, I realized I could grab all other kinds of information, as well. The pkgcheck.sh script will check for:
Signature and Notarization
Type of Package: Component, Distribution, legacy bundle or mpkg
Identifier and version (when present)
Install-location
for Distribution and mpkg types, shows the information for all components as well
for every script in a pkg or component, checks the first line of the script for shebangs of the deprecated interpreters (/bin/bash, /usr/bin/python, /usr/bin/perl, and /usr/bin/ruby) and print a warning when found
How to run pkgcheck.sh
Run the script with the target pkg file as an argument:
% ./pkgcheck.sh sample.pkg
You can give more than one file:
% ./pkgcheck.sh file1.pkg file2.pkg ...
When you pass a directory, pkgcheck.sh will recursively search for all files or bundle directories with the pkg or mpkg extension in that directory:
% ./pkgcheck.sh SamplePkgs
Features and Errors
There are a few more things that I think might be useful to check in this script. Most of all, I want to add an indicator whether a component is enabled by default or not. If you can think of any other valuable data to display, let me know. (Issue or Pull Request or just ping me on MacAdmins Slack)
I have tested the script against many pkgs that I came across. However, there are likely edge cases that I haven’t anticipated, which might break the script. If you run into any of those, let me know. (File an Issue or Pull Request.) Having the troublesome pkg would of course be a great help.
Note: the script will create a scratch directory for temporary file extractions. The script doesn’t actually expand the entire pkg file, only the Scripts sub-archive. The scratch folder will be cleaned out at the beginning of the next run, but not when the script ends, as you might want to do some further inspections.
Sample outputs
This is a sample pkg I build in my book, it has pre- and postinstall scripts using a /bin/bash shebang:
