##osx-server

evening

Hey bruienne

howdy ctdawe

Mmmh, system_profiler command refuses to save a report anywhere other than the logged in user's home directory, is that normal behaviour? Any way I can get around it?

where's allister when you need him. i'm trying not to grep before awk, but this command seems to require it:

ps auxww | grep "/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{print $2}'

msim: even when you pipe output in terminal? seems weird

Yeah, I get permission denied whenever I attempt to save it elsewhere, including when attempting a sudo, doesn't even prompt for a password

elliotjordan: Are you doing launchctl bsexec hackery?

gneagle: yep, trying it out

msim: this works for me: system_profiler SPHardwareDataType > /Users/Shared/test.txt

Hm.

I'm doing an xml, could you try that?

msim: i didn't even have to sudo

sure, 1 sec

msim: yep, this works too: system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml > /Users/Shared/test.xml

msim: If you aren't running it as root, you can save it only places you have write rights...

msim: the same should be true of any output, though not just system_profiler. does echo "hello world" > /Users/Shared/hello.txt work for you?

Hmm, I initially attempted running it via casper, without getting anywhere, which is why I moved to trying the command in terminal

casper runs scripts as root, so you should have permission to save wherever

Yeah, that's what I thought

but let's back up one step. what are you trying to get out of system_profiler that you can't already get out of casper?

Have a case open with Apple, they want a system report

I'll do a little more testing myself and poke my head back in later.

msim: fair enough

msim: elliotjordan showed you the exact commands he tried; perhaps you could do the same

Yeah, they worked, but I realised that's because /Users/Shared/ is writeable for anyone

elliotjordan: If you try save it anywhere out of the /Users/ folder /Library/Logs/ for example, with a sudo, what do you get?

hmm, interesting. doesn't work

sudo system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml > /Library/Logs/test.xml

-bash: /Library/Logs/test.xml: Permission denied

Same result here.

Yeah, that's what I was seeing

elliotjordan: ps auxww | awk '/System.Library.CoreServices.loginwindow.app.Contents.MacOS.loginwindow/ {print $2}'

Your user doesn't have rights to write to /Library/Logs/test.xml

I just realised I had an error in my if statement I was using in casper for it, I fixed that and it runs via casper

sudo doesn't help with > output redirects

Ah, okay.

Oh, well I learned something new.

you could write to /tmp and then sudo mv to /Library/Logs

You ran system_profiler with elevated rights

But the output redirect is still your normal rights

elliotjordan: awk uses regular expression searches with the forward slash starting/stopping it - so if you try to match a forward slash in the middle of your search, you can either escape it - or just replace it with a period which matches one of any character.

But the subsequent redirect...

now i have my my #TIL of the day courtesy of gneagle!

elliotjordan: Unfortunately awk will match itself in that list, which is what the purpose of the grep -v was

Yeah, that's actually really useful to know.

frogor: right, that's why i thought the grep -v "grep" was necessary

is there an equiv in awk?

elliotjordan: Just do what you were doing

it works

don't worry about "never grep before awk" silliness

gneagle msim: but since casper runs all scripts as root, wouldn't the redirect also belong to root?

elliotjordan: But in this instance, you can do a trick and just have at least one backslashed forward slash due to the nature of how ps works.

what is the meaning of not doing a grep before an awk?

elliotjordan: ps auxww | awk '/System.Library.CoreServices.loginwindow.app.Contents.MacOS\/loginwindow/ {print $2}'

is there actual reasoning there?

elliotjordan: Sure but we never saw msim's script so we can't know wht it was actually doing

samdm: Someone told Allister that and he remembered it

ps will show the literal search including the escaped forward slash '\/' which will now count as *two* characters, which an escaped forward slash will not match

He was so proud he wanted to show everyone

Alternatively you could escape all of them, but it's not necessary beyond having the one.

could it be that awk is more expensive and if your grep returns nothing it would be pointless?

awk can do lots of cool stuff that often means you don't _need_ to grep

Yeah. It's just one less command in the pipeline

But most awking and greping of output is by definition a fragile hack

If you were going to run it through awk anyways to do field printing, why not also use it for searching

true

So being particular about it seems silly

"I don't like your fragile hack, use my better fragile hack"

yeah, seems like grep before awk is actually the simpler option here, even though it too is a hack

Agreed

Hehe, whats up elliotjordan

You could also grep the output of `killall -s loginwindow`

hah

Also, hope you take into account that grepping / searching for loginwindow will show multiple values if you've got fast user switching enabled.

yep, accounting for that frogor

CURRENT_USER=$(/usr/bin/stat -f%Su /dev/console)

not perfect, but it does the job w/r/t casper

Yeah you need to know what the output is going to be like before you mangle it.

elliotjordan: what are we doing?

trying to launch an app in the context of the current user, using a script that runs in root context

as in, casper just updated dropbox and now it needs to relaunch the app

it's all very hacky

So is it worth it?

for dropbox, maybe

for the combination of all apps, probably

Just let Dropbox update itself...

gneagle: Preach it.

yep, dropbox does a good job with that lately

some apps don't

elliotjordan: yeah current user stuff is a !@#$

So don't update them while they are in use

That way lies madness

doing that too. policy runs at startup

lots of people never restart

and?

i've pretty much made up my mind that i'm going to do this. just need to find the best way how. :-)

19:53 up 30 days