The Only James

I needed to display the ARDAgent version on a Mac the other day without sending anyone (else) in to the command line. Without any remote access I decided a quick Applescript would do the job. It’s very dirty, nothing more than a quick hack really… But it worked. Here’s the code in case you ever need to do the same.

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try
	set ardv to do shell script "cat /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/version.plist | awk '/CFBundleVersion/{getline;gsub(/[<string>|<\\/string>]/,\"\");gsub(/^[ 	]+|[ 	]+$/,\"\");print}'"
 
	display alert "ARDAgent found!" message "Version: " & ardv buttons "Quit"
on error err
	display alert "ARDAgent Version failed." message err buttons "Quit"
end try

The interesting part is the cat piped in to awk. It’s a messy way of stripping out everything except the CFBundleVersion. It works. I didn’t say it was graceful!