Installing Apple Packages Remotely

I have a Mac that I maintain remotely and I have been using the command line software update to install the standard Mac updates.

# softwareupdate –list

# softwareupdate –install –all

I didn’t know I could do the same thing for packages until this morning when the 10.7.4 update broke one of my macs in a weird way. I could do many things as long I didn’t touch the menu bar or some dialog boxes. If I did, the program seemed to hang in using the shader compiler to send stuff to the ATI chip.

I downloaded the 10.7.4 Combo Update from Apple, but I could not launch the Installer.

This article gave me the info I needed. 

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030614230204397

I found out I can run package updates from the command line.

sudo installer -pkg MacOSXUpdCombo10.7.4.pkg

 

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Manually Deleting Applications on the Mac

My quick list of things to look for when deleting Mac applications manually. Most mac applications seem well behaved and only populate things in /Applications and maybe a couple things in ~/Library. Other applications seems to try to put things in all sort of directories and even their own uninstaller doesn’t clean up after them. Today’s problem child is Mark/Space’s Missing Sync. I ran the uninstaller, but it left behind a lot of stuff. So this is just my list of places to go look to uninstall the remaining pieces of applications.

• First look to see if they have an uninstaller in /Applications
• Re-download the package and see if the package comes with an uninstaller.
• Applications, look for Applications and Folders named for what you want to uninstall.
• Run AppZapper if there is no uninstaller
• /Library/Application Support
• /Library/Frameworks
• /Library/Preferences
• /Library/LaunchAgents
• /Library/LaunchDaemons
• /System/Library/Extensions
• ~/Library/Application Support
• ~/Library/Preferences