Find Mac OSX version installed using AppleScript

Question

Hi

How can I find which version of OSX is installed on my Mac by using AppleScript? I want to install an app programatically and run different pkg files based on the version.

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not too familiar with AppleScript, but AFAIK you can get some info about versions from the shell with the sw_vers command.

e.g.,:

ProductName: Mac OS X ProductVersion: 10.5.6 BuildVersion: 9G55 Macintosh:~ udekel$

If you can read and parse that from appleScript, that may be a solution, though I'm sure there has to be something more elegant.

Answer 2

I'm not on a Mac, so there may be a better way to do this, but the first approach that comes to mind is just executing a shell command to query the OS version.

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2065.html#TNTAG2

http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/sw_vers.1.html

Based on these references, you probably want to do something like:

set os_version to do shell script "sw_vers -productVersion"

Answer 3

Try something along these lines:

tell application "Terminal"
activate

set theVersion to do script with command "sw_vers -productVersion"
end tell

Edit : It was pointed out that this does open the terminal, and that probably isn't the behavior you want.

Answer 4

You can get version from the Finder app as well

tell application "Finder"
    set os_version to version
end tell

display dialog os_version

On my machine this displays "10.5.8".