Mac Geekery

Why not use defaults, which will even work on binary .plists?

defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion ProductVersion

Your command brings back two lines of XML on my machine:

        <key>ProductVersion</key>
        <string>10.4.5</string>

An alternative approach might be the command:

system_profiler -detailLevel mini SPSoftwareDataType | grep "System Version"

which produces the slightly cleaner result:

      System Version: Mac OS X 10.4.5 (8H14)

Each approach would require a little bit more processing (perhaps awk) to strip out the surrounding text if you wanted to test against the result in a script. If you want an easier version of the command, it can be simplified to the following, although it will then run slightly slower (about one to two seconds on my machine, against almost instantaneous for the first version):

system_profiler | grep "System Version"

system_profiler is a great way to get command-line information. Without parameters it prints out a wealth of information. But you can limit it as follows to see just the system software version.

Miss-Daisy:~ imacpr0n$ system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType

Software:


    System Software Overview:

      System Version: Mac OS X 10.4.9 (8P2137)
      Kernel Version: Darwin 8.9.1
      Boot Volume: Miss Daisy
      Computer Name: Miss Daisy
      User Name: iMac Pr0n

It’s probably better to use ‘sw_vers’ for this (as it’s likely to exist across Mac OS X revisions whereas that particular plist may cease to exist in the future).

% sw_vers
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.4.9
BuildVersion: 8P135

uname -r

This works in Mac OS X, Red Hat Fedora Core and Ubuntu:

#!/bin/csh -f


	
if(-r /etc/fedora-release) then
    cat /etc/fedora-release

else if(-r /etc/lsb-release) then
    perl -ne ‘if(/DESCRIPTION/) { s/.“(.)”/$1/; print; }’ /etc/lsb-release

else if(-d /System/Library) then
    set version_plist=System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist

    foreach vol (/Volumes/*)
        if(-r “$vol/$version_plist”) then
            set name=`defaults read “$vol/${version_plist:r}” ProductName`
            set build=`defaults read “$vol/${version_plist:r}” ProductBuildVersion`
            set version=`defaults read “$vol/${version_plist:r}” ProductUserVisibleVersion`
            printf “%-16s %10s %-10s %10s\n” “${vol:t}” “$name” “$version” “(build $build)”
        endif
    end
else
    echo “Unknown OS: `uname -s`”
endif