Category: Tools

I added this to a discussion on the MacAdmins Slack today and realized it could be useful for a broader audience.

The underlying problem is that by default HFS+ (the file system of OS X) is “case preserving, but case-insensitive.” That means the file system will remember wether you named a file or directory “README.TXT” “ReadMe.txt” or “readme.TXT” and preserve that case, but using either of these will point to the same file.

This may be confusing in Terminal. Since most other Unix and Linux file-system are case-sensitive (i.e. README.TXT and readme.txt are different files) most shells are, too. So on OS X in bash you can write:

$ cd ~/DESKTOP

and it will actually work. Though if you then print the working directory, you get

$ pwd
/Users/armin/DESKTOP

which doesn’t hurt anything really, since Desktop and DESKTOP are the same. But it does hurt our OCD, right?

While I have not yet found a way to change this behaviour directly, one thing you can change is wether tab-completion is case-sensitive or not. Since the underlying filesystem is insensitive, there really is no reason tab-completion should be. This way you can type /sy[tab]/l[tab]/cor[tab] and it will expand to /System/Library/CoreServices/.

Tab-completion is not just for laziness, but also a way to ensure you are typing a path correctly, especially since tab-completion will escape spaces and other nasty characters automatically.

To make tab-completion in bash case-insensitive put this in your .inputrc (create if necessary)

# Ignore case while completing
set completion-ignore-case on

and then close all Terminal windows and start a new one.

I updated quickpkg with a few additions:

Scripts

You can now add pre- and postinstall scripts or an entire folder of scripts.

Ownership

Added an --ownership parameter that will be passed straight through to pkgbuild. Usually the default recommended will be what you want, but it is there if you need it.

Output

There is now a --output parameter that gives you more control over the location and name of the resulting package.

Bonus Trick

And as a neat trick, you can easily create a droplet for quickpkg with Automator by following the same instructions as for munkiimport in this article.

This tool will quickly and easily build a package from an installed application, a disk image file or zip archive with an enclosed application bundle. It will also extract the application name and version and use it to name the resulting pkg file.

The tool will look for applications on the first level of the disk image or archive. If it finds no or more than one application it will error.

The name of the resulting package will be of the form {name}-{version}.pkg. Spaces will be removed from the name. The package will be written to the current working directory.

Get the tool at the quickpkg repository.

Examples

Build package from installed application:

quickpkg /Applications/Numbers.app

Build package from a disk image:

quickpkg ~/Downloads/Firefox\ 43.0.4.dmg

Build package from a zip archive:

quickpkg ~/Downloads/Things.zip

Background

OS X has had the pkgbuild tool since Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard. With pkgbuild you can directly build a installer package from an application in the /Applications folder:

pkgbuild --component /Applications/Numbers.app Numbers.pkg

Or even an application inside a mounted dmg:

pkgbuild --component /Volumes/Firefox/Firefox.app \
         --install-location /Applications \
         Firefox.pkg

This tool even does the work of determining a bundle’s identifier and version and sets the identifier and version of the pkg to the same values.

However, while pkgbuild does automatically name the package, it does not include the version, which is important when you tracking many versions of the same application. It also doesn’t automatically look into a dmg file or zip archive.

quickpkg vs autopkg

This tool is not meant to replace autopkg. autopkg will automate the download, the re-packaging (if necessary) and the upload to and configuration of your client management system. It can also handle much more complex setups than quickpkg. autopkg is far superior and should be your tool of choice.

However, there are situations where autopkg does not work well. The most common reason is if the download cannot be automated because the download page is behind a paywall. Also autopkg requires a recipe for a given piece of software. If no recipe exists, quickpkg may be a simple alternative. (Though if quickpkg works, creating an autopkg recipe should not be hard.)

Warning

All quickpkg does is identify an application bundle and package it in a way that the package will install that application bundle into the /Applications folder. If the application needs other files (libraries, frameworks, configuration files, license files, preferences etc.) to run and work they are your responsibility.

MacID is a very useful application which automatically locks a Mac when a paired iOS device moves out of range. It will also offer to unlock the Mac using Touch ID on the device, but I use that part less than I would expect. (You can also unlock with Apple Watch, which is cool.)
The latest update adds scripting support:

You can now extend MacID by dropping AppleScript text files (they MUST be exported as text files) into onSleep, onLock, onWake, onUnlock directories in ~/Application Support/MacID/. MacID will execute these scripts at the respective event. For example, you could pause iTunes when your Mac locks, and resume playing when your Mac unlocks.

To try this, I created a simple AppleScript

tell application "iTunes"
  pause
end tell

and saved it as a text AppleScript document in the onUnlock folder. Works as expected!