So here’s the situation: You have a Mac mini that’s used as a Zoom Room controller. You’ve enabled automatic login. You don’t want the screensaver to come on ever and it should never ask for a password if the screen is turned off. This is a common ask and used to be really simple. You’d just go into Jamf, create a configuration profile, add the Applications & Custom Settings payload, choose Upload, set the domain to com.apple.screensaver and add two XML keys askForPassword and idleTime set to integer0. This is known as an “MCX” style payload, they are from the olden OS X Server days.
You made this payload years ago and it worked reliably for years. Until Sonoma came out. Then you were hearing that Zoom Rooms were restarting after OS updates to the “lock screen” requiring a password?! What was going on? You open a Feedback and ACE case, you are asked for sysdiagnoses even though they are attached and you hear nothing. The summer passes, Sequoia comes out, “darn seems like they didn’t fix this”, you think. Then you wonder, maybe it’s not the OS that’s broken but something else?
Turns out Apple changed how macOS it interprets the Screensaver domain keys in an MCX style payload. Apparently, it can’t tolerate them any more. Integer values of 0 now cause it to Immediately ask for password! Now, instead of setting askForPassword to the integer 0it’s boolean and you need to set that to true (yeah, that’s right, true) and then you set the key askForPasswordDelay to… yeah, you got it: 2147483647! That’s what you were gonna say right? 😑 See the Apple documentation and check your incredulity at the door, they say this has been around since 10.11 and the crazy high askForPasswordDelay value they say came about in 10.13 but macOS sure as heck respected the simple MCX style payloads up until macOS 13!? So is this a typo? Regardless it’s super unintuitive, unfriendly and non-obvious
Thankfully, they didn’t mess with how idleTime is interpreted, it still works as an integer set to 0. Here’s the whole thing in an MDM .mobileconfig file.
As you can see things are a bit more complicated now. Applications & Custom Settings won’t make payloads like this and if you upload this to Jamf, make sure to sign it (with something like Hancock) otherwise it will throw out the stuff it doesn’t understand. Just look at what it does understand out of all that.
And if you wonder, “Well doesn’t the Jamf GUI let you build a config profile with the settings you need” the answer is no, it doesn’t, the time is a drop down that goes from “Immediately” to “8 hours” just a hair shy of 2147483647
No, I haven’t made a “Jamf idea” about this, although I did make an unfruitful FB (FB13736030) with Apple July 2024. I just don’t think they care much about MCX payloads acting weird. Why it needed to so radically change things isn’t clear but for now, if you want something that works, copy the above XML into a file that ends in .mobileconfig, sign with Hancock (or similar) and upload into your Jamf’s Configuration Profiles and scope only to Sonama and higher Macs. Make sure to exclude your old payload from them too. Now, next time your Zoom Room Mac gets an OS update, it will auto-login (if you’ve set that) after restart without getting stuck at the lock screen.
Or rather should I say, “Do you know when they are”? Tell me, Mac Admins, has this ever happened to you: You need to figure out when a computer last submitted inventory to Jamf. Seems easy, right? Just use the built-in Last Inventory criteria, right? Well, if you use the API to update computer records then the moment you do, that becomes the new Last Inventory date. The actual time when a Mac last sent it’s inventory is lost and can now only be loosely correlated with Last Check-In. Not ideal™
Does anyone really know what time it is?
Adding zLast Inventory (Actual) creates a safe harbor for the actual date of an inventory submission. It won’t change no matter how many API writes you make to the computer record. Just create a new extension attribute in your Jamf with an input type of Script and a data type of Date. Leave it in the General category, so it’s nearer to the built-in Last Inventory field in the UI. You might also want to add it as a default column in your Computer Inventory Display preferences and/or use it in Advanced Searches and reports where more reality is desired.
Additional Uses for finding victim’s of “Unknown Error”
With zLast Inventory (Actual) you may also be able to find Macs that are quietly failing to submit inventory. I came across a few Macs with a cryptic "Unknown Error" message a few months ago. When jamf recon runs it fails to upload the inventory which is bad enough but more insidiously the Last Inventory date in Jamf is updated anyway! The fix seemed to require removing both the Jamf framework on the endpoint and deleting the computer record in Jamf before re-enrolling. If you know what this is let me know! Anyway here it is, all two lines all gussied up with lots of comments.
The extension attribute
#!/bin/bash
# zLast Inventory (Actual) - Copyright (c) 2025 Joel Bruner (https://github.com/brunerd/macAdminTools/tree/main/Jamf/EAs) Licensed under the MIT License
# A Jamf Pro Extension Attribute to report the _actual time_ of a successful inventory submission
# This is to address two issues with the built-in Last Inventory:
# 1) This date stamp is not affected by API writes to the computer record
# 2) Detect "Unknown Error" inventory submission failures if date does not match built-in Last Inventory date (excluding API writes in History)
# Notes:
# The "z" at the beginning of this EA's name is to ensure it is runs last and is closest to built-in Last Inventory datestamp
# The Jamf EA date type does not consider time zone offsets so we must normalize the time to UTC (-u) for the most consistent behavior
# When viewing an EA date in a Report, Inventory Display, or Computer Record it will not be localized according to Preferences as built-in dates are
#MySQL DATETIME format with time normalized to UTC (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)
DATE_NORMALIZED=$(date -u +"%F %T")
echo "<result>${DATE_NORMALIZED}</result>"
It looks only slightly better in the UI…
Note: EA dates are not localized according to your UI prefs, unlike like built-in dates.
Ideas in Waiting
Apparently, my “maximizer” self can’t just write a dang two-line script without also thinking of all the “Jamf Ideas” that either need to be created and or upvoted in relation this. I encourage you to take a look at these and vote them up too.
“Inventory Time becomes incorrect with API (JN-I-16064)” – The “raison d’être” of this blog post, it shouldn’t be called Last Inventory if API writes are going to affect it also. This feature request dates back to May 22, 2014 (and I’m sure there are FRs that pre-date that!) It’s status is “Future Consideration”: At almost 11 years later, the future is here now Jamf!
“Expanded parsing of date and time formats in extension attribute(JPRO-I-1078)” – Jamf hitched it’s wagon to MySQL’s DATETIME format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS which was introduced in 1999 and has no provisions for time zone. In 2025 this seems somewhat rudimentary. Jamf could expand what’s accepted for date types to accommodate more date time representations or at least in the short term document the fact you need normalize all times to UTC before sending.
“Ability to customize order of display fields in Reports (JN-I-22451)” – Another “oldie but goody” from Jan 22, 2014 (Happy belated 11th Birthday!) it has 575 votes and has to be one of the most requested features that’s still under “Future Consideration” (again, the future is now Jamf). If we have to make an extension attribute to get some truth for Last Inventory can we at least have it show up somewhere we’d like? This request has many siblings, some that should be merged here, here, here, here and ones that were merged here and here.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, you cannot “Retain Display items when Cloning Saved Advanced Search (JN-I-22827)“ I thought I was going crazy after I’d made a series of reports by cloning, only to find the “clones” had only copied the search criteria but not the all those Display items I’d spent time checking off – that I had to do again and again. [Edit: I might have misremembered and you have to uncheck the default Display items you don’t want re-enabled in your “clone” so this still holds true] Aye, what kinda “clone” is that?! It’s not! This “idea” is labeled Not likely to implement but hey, you can still leave your angsty comments in memoriam like me, vote it up, and pour outta 40. 🪦🍻 [ Edit: Yes, these are “first world” nerd problems, I know. Blame it on the bad early 2025 vibes.]
Where was I? Oh right, the thing…
In closing, add zLast Inventory (Actual) as an extension attribute to your Jamf. You never know when you might need a bit of reality for Last Inventory in your Jamf reports and searches.
Run a Jamf shop? Would you like to collect stats on who’s turned on Apple Intelligence so far? That is, if your company hasn’t already had you put the kibosh on it! Personally I think Apple Intelligence and it’s Private Cloud Compute are a secure and private way to use things like the Writing Tools to proofread, make list or tables, etc. without wondering if your corporate data is being used in further LLM training. If your company is so enlightened and you’d like to see which Macs have Apple Intelligence enabled, read on! Or perhaps, you’d just like to see how it’s done. It’s not as straightforward as you might think, Apple engineers are really into obfuscation these days!
Finding the Suspects
The first part of the fun is hunting down which file might indicate the status of Apple Intelligence. I closed all other apps except System Settings, toggled Apple Intelligence on and off and tried a few things: Looking at /Library/Preferences in Finder sorted by date (in this case make sure to show hidden files), running FSMonitor to see things visualized, running fs_usage -w -f filesys | grep plist while screen recording in Quicktime to see the exact moment I enabled/disable Apple Intelligence. After some toggling it is determined that ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist is our target. A few days later I re-discovered Bob Gendler’s excellent post about using the command log stream --debug --predicate 'process == "cfprefsd" && eventMessage CONTAINS "wrote the key"' to help narrow things down and this also confirmed this is the file (as well as many others) being written to when it’s enabled.
Obfuscation Investigations
Let’s look at ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist and see if we can find the exact key name. This file is a bit special in that you can do the same thing 5 6 different ways with defaults! Run one of these commands as the console user not root:
Bonus update: 👆Shows up in defaults read and nowhere else
Regardless of how we do it though, the output for the com.apple.gms.availability keys is abridged and useless to us in this form.
What’s going on? What is this halting hexadecimal hodgepodge? Let’s use defaults export -g - to print the contents to in XML1 format (BTW you won’t find export documented in the man page, after a decade it still only exists in defaults -h help).
Ah, OK, these keys are <data> types which contain base64 encoded strings. The contents are possibly binary data. We’ve already established that defaults is not going to be useful to us. In my previous post Respecting Focus and Meeting Status in Your Mac scripts (aka Don’t Be a Jerk) we are able to extract the data using plutil -extract however because these key names contains periods (aka “full stop” U+2E) this clashes with plutil’s shoddy “keypath” parsing, which uses periods to delimit the path but doesn’t respect escaping periods with a backslashes (which is not hard to do as my JSON tool ljt can handles this). So all we are left with is /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy let’s give that a try: /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist -c "print :com.apple.gms.availability.key (Spoiler alert the key is: com.apple.gms.availability.key)
OK! There we go, it’s a binary plist inside the key of a plist! “Brilliant” Apple, really. 🙄 Alright then, let’s pipe this through plutil -convert xml1 - -o - and get some ASCII XML yeah?
Pardon moi, but what the shit is this!? 💩 file said it was an “Apple binary property list” – according to those first bytes. Let’s look at it run through xxd to see if we can find more clues.
Aha! There is an extraneous newline (0x0a) that PlistBuddy is outputting (annoying but at least consistent!). Why can’t that just be ignored? Because apparently the last byte of a binary plist is the offset table, mess that up and it all falls apart. So what we need to do is trim this dangling newline. For this I consulted ChatGPT and perl -pe 'chomp if eof' is the magic we need. BTW ChatGPT does well for me to ask very targeted and direct questions like this, I don’t ask it to write entire scripts but sometimes it will have insights into different methods I’d never considered.
OMG. SRSLY? Apple is writing data encoded binary plist data containing a single integer value in an array?! ATTN: Craig Federighi: Please tell your engineers to stop junking up an otherwise elegant system with these obfuscation games. Alright, let’s bring it home and get the value with this: /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist -c "print :com.apple.gms.availability.key" | perl -pe 'chomp if eof' | plutil -convert xml1 - -o - | plutil -extract 0 raw - -o -
There we go: 0 (zero), which means Apple Intelligence is on. When it’s 2, it’s off. Yet another key like PrivateMACAddressModeSystemSetting which has the opposite meaning of what you might expect. BTW I’ve yet to see the value as 1, except for this June Tweet where someone writes a 1 to turn on Writing Tools on a beta. BTW this key only indicates the state, in my testing it does notaffect the state, meaning if you change the value (and even do a killall cfprefsd) all it will do is blank out the Apple Intelligence toggle for a moment and then it’ll sort itself out and display the true state.
And yes there is another way to get the state of Apple Intelligence however it makes the assumption that you only have one account in MobileMeAccounts.plist to determine your AccountDSID and then query yet another file but if you have more than one Apple Account, you know like for all your purchases in: iTunes/Music/App Store there may be multiple accounts (** cough** merge accounts Apple! **cough**) so it may return an erroneous results if you have more than one account.
The ChatGPT integration is actually a cinch to determine. I used the same method above to find the plist and then, because the engineers on this didn’t play games with encoded binary plist data within a plist, all you need to do is simply ask: defaults read com.apple.siri.generativeassistantsettings isEnabled and amazingly 0 means off and 1 means on, imagine that!
Usable Extension Attributes
You’ve made it this far, here’s the goods: OS-Apple Intelligence Availability.sh and OS-Apple Intelligence ChatGPT Status.sh they are fully commented and when you run them here’s what they return. I’m trying out a new way to output both values and their interpretations, because let’s be honest, we are “reading tea leaves” here. 🍵 None of this is officially documented by Apple and always subject to change. If a new value pops up, it will still be reported in the output. You won’t have to scramble to fix the extension attribute right away, just adjust the criteria in your Smart Group to match the value in the parentheses if there’s a policy that depends on it.
Closing Thoughts
What an absolute pain it was to get a single numerical value from a single key! To that end after I had written these extension attributes I went to work over the Thanksgiving break and wrote a tool to make this effortless. I’ll be releasing this tool, which will work as both a standalone tool and a shell script function in the coming days!
It’s been a busy 2 weeks since Apple released macOS Sequoia! One of the new features is private Wi-Fi addresses aka “MAC address randomization”. While this all well-and-good and can “improve your privacy”, it has been causing headaches for folks in the environments where random MAC address are not a good thing.
Now, Apple did think about this somewhat as evidenced by: About private Wi-Fi addresses and enterprise networks and Wi-Fi MDM settings for Apple devices but they didn’t really do a complete “dress rehearsal” of what would happen: You can’t deploy an MDM WiFi profile with the DisableAssociationMACRandomization key until the Mac is already upgraded to macOS Sequoia and once upgraded to Sequoia the MAC randomizes and that could break your connectivity to get the new config profile! It’s a real “chicken and egg problem” 🐣 that is laid out in great detail here.
Seeing the angst created, the contortions required, and overall FML vibes this was causing I did some investigations to see what could be done and guess what? You can pre-populate the PrivateMACAddressModeUserSetting value to off in the wifi.network.ssid.<SSID> dictionary of /Library/Preferences/com.apple.wifi.known-networks.plistbefore a Mac upgrades to Sequoia! 🎉 Note: When you set this via script (versus GUI), the change does not take effect until reboot, the MAC stays randomized and the UI does not reflect this. This doesn’t matter if it’s for an upgrade to Sequoia but just letting you know if you try it on Macs already on Sequoia, it won’t take effect until a reboot. If there’s some clever kill -HUP that can be sent let me know. I tried killall cfprefsd but that wasn’t enough.Update: Thanks to boberito in the MacAdmins Slack, he figured out that killing cfprefsd and airportd would update the UI and power cycling the Wi-Fi would cause this change to take effect! I’ve added an option to the script to do this, set restartWiFi_HC="1" to restart Wi-Fi, just be aware you better make sure your Wi-Fi reconnects!
If that’s all you need to know, then god-speed and good luck to you! If you’d like a Jamf script and extension attribute read on…
You can use the script setPrivateMACAddressMode to set the mode of one or more SSIDs on a target Mac. As it is, the SSID must have been previously connected to so the wifi.network.ssid.<SSID> gets filled out. I tried writing the value to an un-populated dictionary and Wi-Fi just wigged out (like nothing in the SSID list kinda weirdness!). Keep that caveat in mind. If you can figure out a minimum viable set of keys that are needed then good for you but for this script, it’ll just skip the SSID if it’s not in alrready in com.apple.wifi.known-networks. This script can be used with Jamf and its policy script parameters or if you are on another MDM, just hard-code the SSIDs, I’ve made allowances for that.
Next, this is a Jamf extension attribute OS-Private MAC Address Mode it will report the mode and the SSID (example: off|My Cool Wifi). You can have it report all known networks or just hardcode the value for specific SSID(s). It can be useful when used in a Smart Group. You could deploy a Major Update deferral config profile to block Sequoia then make a Smart Group for exclusion using OS-Private MAC Address Mode ‘is like‘ off or ‘matches regex‘ ^off\|for more precise matching . When someone becomes a member the Smart Group it excludes them from the Major Update deferral config profile and can then upgrade to Sequoia.
Lastly, if you don’t have Jamf but want to see what the values are getPrivateMACAddressMode will spit out a a human readable list of SSIDs and modes (off, static, rotating, and NOT_SET)
I usually try to put more pictures and illustrations in my posts but every moment I spend not publishing this, the more weekends that are possibly ruined by thinking about the suck that is macOS Sequoia Private Wi-Fi addresses in managed environments. I think this pic will sum things up! 😄
UPDATES: A couple things to keep in mind: 1) If you deploy Config Profiles with Wi-Fi payloads, then it will blow away everything about the SSID com.apple.wifi.known-networksevery time the config profile is redeployed! 2) That means if you do deploy a Wi-Fi config profile with the Sequoia-only DisableAssociationMACRandomization key it will blow away the manually set key PrivateMACAddressModeUserSetting in com.apple.wifi.known-networks. The EA OS-Private MAC Address Mode currently does not attempt to resolve if an SSID has a corresponding config profile profile with the DisableAssociationMACRandomization key set, so it will be blank. 3) As of 15.0.1 a user can still change the setting even when deployed via MDM, contrary to Apple’s stated behavior: “This value is only locked when MDM installs the profile. If the profile is manually installed, the system sets the value but the user can change it”. 3b) Actually I found that if you killall airportd before rebooting, it’ll lock the value – until reboot. 4) Apple also draws user attention to setting with a caution icon ⚠️ in the Wi-Fi dropdown rather than a “check” icon like they use for managed Login Items in System Settings (the whole thing is an inconsistent mess)
Update 2: Steven Xu over in the Jamf Nation forums found that setting the PrivateMACAddressModeSystemSetting key to 1 (integer, not boolean) within /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist will disable Private MAC Addresses by default. Newly joined networks or networks where the PrivateMACAddressModeUserSetting key for an SSID is off or not already set to static or rotating will use their actual MAC address. I’ve added support for setting this key in setPrivateMACAddressMode and it too will not take effect in Sequoia+ until either a reboot or setting the variable to restartWiFi_HC="1". Just keep in mind, perhaps you want your users to have Private MAC addresses by default when joining new and unknown networks? Why should the free Wi-Fi at the food court or coffee shop get your real MAC address anyway!? The getPrivateMACAddressMode script and extensions attribute OS-Private MAC Address Mode have been updated to report on (disable)PrivateMACAddressModeSystemSetting also.
My new tool clui, pronounced “clue-ee” offers Command Line Unicode Info with the ability to export to a variety of formats like CSV, JSON, YAML, RTF and more. While I’ve written a few macOS command line tools geared to the Mac Admin like jpt the JSON power tool, ljt the little JSON tool, shui for easily adding AppleScript dialogs to your shell script, and most recently shef a Unicode text encoder and formatter for shell scripters. This is one is almost “just for fun” although you might find some practical uses for it. Writing shef opened my eyes to the stunning amount of detail and craftsmanship in macOS’ Unicode-aware fonts, which comprise not just the alphabets of the world but signs, symbols, and even Egyptian hieroglyphics! While macOS’s built-in Character Viewer does a pretty good job to group and display these characters it’s a painstakingly manual process if you want to get info on a range of characters. I hope clui makes it fun and easy to poke around the vast Unicode neighborhood.
If you don’t feel like reading you can watch this.
Starting with Character Viewer
First let’s take a look at Character View, perhaps you don’t know some of it’s features. If you quickly press the dedicated “globe” 🌐 button on newer Macs (or the keyboard combo Control-Command-Spacebar on older models) it will likely open up Character Viewer in it’s default mini-sized version with preset categories along the bottom. You can click on a symbol or character and it will insert the text in your current app. The real fun begins when you click the little icon in the upper right to expand the view.
The window will expand to show more information: The code point(s) in hexadecimal (U+hhhh), the UTF-8 encoding bytes, and related characters. You will need to double-click these to insert them into your current app.
You can also Customize the List of categories that appear in the left column by clicking the encircled ellipsis…
The one that has everything in it is Unicode under the Code Tables group at the bottom of the list.
Jackpot!
You can right-click or control-click on a character to Copy Character Info into the clipboard. In the example below, we discover that what most Mac folks would call ⌘ “Command” is also known as the “Place of Interest Sign”. Whaddya know!
This is all well and good but who’d want to do that for thousands of characters?! What if someone wanted this info at the command line? It got me thinking: There’s Got to Be a Better Way!™
Searching for the Source
The first order of business was looking for where macOS kept it’s naming information and if it was possible to extract that information with command line tools. It ended up being in two files, a SQLite database and a plist. Here’s their full paths:
#Single code point characters and Unicode symbols
/System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/CharacterDB.sqlite3
#plist of single and multiple code point Emoji
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreEmoji.framework/Versions/A/Resources/en.lproj/AppleName.strings
There is some overlap with CharacterDB.sqlite3 and AppleName.strings where Apple choose to use different phrasing for an Emoji vs. Unicodes name, but in general the former has single code point entries, while the latter has both single and the multi-codepoint Emoji sequences. clui will report on both, putting a semi-colon in between each version, you can also output discretely with the -D option. Descriptions/info fields are converted from uppercase to lowercase BECAUSE WHO LIKES GETTING YELLED AT?! 🙉 Although you can preserve case with -p which can help with deciphering the internal (and unlabeled!) columns Apple uses in the descriptions of the CJK Ideographic ranges.
clui in Action: Practical Examples
Simple Lookups
If you’d like to see what all the options and modes run clui -u to get the “usage” output, or take a look at on clui’s GitHub page. To start with, clui is built to ingest both “regular” characters and also representation of Unicode code points in hexadecimal in the style of: U+hhhhh or 0xhhhhh. Ranges can also be specified by simply adding a hyphen between to characters or codepoints and it can both ascend and descend. The default output is CSV.
Apple doesn’t want to call anyone a nerd apparently, but that’s OK I embrace it.
For multiple code point emoji you can enclose the code point representations in quotes. Spaces within quotes are only used delimit each code point and are not part of the composite character.
The -X expansion option will display the all the code points together, then break out each component
-x will expand the input and break out each code point without showing the composite character
Working with Categories and Groups
clui can tap into categories and groups by leveraging the the plists inside the Resources folder of CharacterPallette.app. These plists contain a mix of 0x code point representations and literal characters. The list option -L takes the upper and lowercase arguments of c or g for exactly what you think, categories and groups! -Lc gets categories marking those with internal subsections with an asterisk * and -LC will expand those categories to include the subsections within. All list outputs are CSV and includes a header row, -h will suppress headers. In this excerpted example below you can see Arrows contains a number of subsections:
clui acts on a categories when you use the -C option and input one or more categories. If no subsection is specified the complete category will be output. Some can be quite large and take several minutes to output! If you are outputting RTF or JSON and redirecting to a file, if you interrupt with Control-C the output will be properly closed up, so it will still be valid.
As you can see at the bottom of the list, not all characters have renderings. However, if you double click those question mark glyphs ⍰ to select and copy them (CSV is nice that way), you will get that exact character. I used the apl “quad question” character (U+2370) above to get something close to it for this example, but don’t let the generic visual representation fool you, it is unique. You can use Character Viewer to see if any other fonts have alternate graphical representations, since Terminal is using only the currently selected font to display output. Update: It will fall back to a font that has a representation if needed. I recommend the free GNU Unifont for “Glyphs above the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane”, which fills in some of the gaps of Apple fonts (like the LCD-like segmented numbers U+1FBF0-U+1FBF9)
Groups are about the same thing as categories except groups are comprised of multiple categories. -Lg lists all groups and -LG will expand the constituent categories within.
You can use -G like -C specifying one or more groups. If you include a category name (comma delimited) after the group, it’ll simply report that category as if you’d used it solely with -C. Here’s an example of the first group AdditionalModernScripts and the member category CanadianAboriginalSyllabics . For variety I’ve added -h to hide the header row from the CSV output.
CSV Looks Great in QuickLook
Just in case you didn’t know, Quicklook will display files with a csv extension really nicely. Here’s the CanadianAboriginalSyllabics above as seen in Quicklook, you can even select characters from within Quicklook, pretty nice!
CSV Can Look Even Better in Numbers
If you want to work with CSV in Numbers it will do quite nicely. Here’s a little tip for better legibility:
Select column A from the top of the column
Command ⌘ click on A1 to deselect it
Format the text to a larger size (like 50 points or higher)
Adjust the column width a bit wider
Save it as a .numbers file to retain formatting
Some of these Emoji will make you hungry
Pro Tip: Quicklook will not let you select any text from a Numbers document! However if you click and drag anywhere in the Quicklook contents to the Desktop (or into Preview), it will export a seamless PDF with no page breaks! Then you can select text from the PDF in QuickLook. Who knew?! Now back to clui features!
Get a Good Look at Those Emojis in Rich Text Format!
A late entry feature to clui is RTF (Rich Text Format) output. This enables clui to present the characters in larger sizes without requiring additional work from you (as seen above in Numbers)! The format is the same as the “plain” output (-Op) which does not label the fields, simply use the -Or option
Your best bet with RTF output is to either redirect it to a file like this: clui -Or -C Emoji > Emoji.rtf or pipe it into pbcopy like so: clui -Or -C Emoji | pbcopy. There’s a neat feature in pbcopy that detects the RTF header data and allows you to paste into TextEdit as rich text. You can also specify the font sizes withthis option: -f <char size, info size>
Searching by Description
clui can also search descriptions for multiple words and phrases. In this example I’ll search for magic, castle, and “clock face” using the -Sd (search descriptions) option. If I had searched just for clock I’d have also gotten hits for “clockwise arrows” since it search for substrings.
Searching by Character
Now, if you search for the usage of a single alphabetical character you’ll probably get one hit but macOS also has a database of “related characters” which are similar look-alike letters. You know, like the Subject lines of spam: “𝔅𝗢𝔾𝕆 𝐒𝖆𝓵𝙚 ‼”. Let’s use -SC to search for "a"plus related characters. I’ve trimmed the output to get some of the more interesting characters in this screenshot
When you start searching for symbols you’ll start discovering Emojis constructed using existing symbols and zero-width joiners (ZWJ, U+200D), these are called ZWJ Sequences (and ZWJ is apparently pronounced “zwidge”) . Let’s use -Sc to search for anything with the female sign ♀.
Let’s examine “woman surfer” (BTW: 100 Foot Wave Season 2 is awesome!) with the -X option to expand all component code points with the complete glyph as-is at the top:
The first line has the Emoji sequence as-is, then each individual component that comprises it: a gender neutral surfer (U+1F3CF), a ZWJ (U+200D), the female sign (U+2640), and variation selector 16 (U+FE0F). You may also notice one of the quirks of Terminal: Sometimes pasted input does not fully render as a unified Emoji!
Fitzpatrick Modifiers for Skin Color
To be honest I’d never heard of the Fitzpatrick scale before working on clui! It’s simply a scale of 6 types of skin color. The Unicode modifier combines Types 1 & 2 into U+1F3FB. Let’s demonstrate a search by description and then again with their ranges. Simply specify the range using standard Unicode notiation U+hhhhh with a hyphen in between.
If you search for an Emoji with a Fitzpatrick Modifier you won’t get a hit in the databases. As a convenience clui will detect this and remove the modifier to get the description. Using the -F will also display the sequence without the modifier. We can combine it with -X for expanded output with a a summary.
As you can see the sequence without the modifier is shown, then the original sequence with the Fitzpatrick modifier then each component part: surfer, Fitzpatrick modifier type-6, a ZWJ, female sign, and a variation selector.
On Variation Selectors
To be honest I’d never known about variation selectors before working on this, more info on Emoji Presentation Sequences can be found here. The two most common variation selectors are pretty easy to understand: U+FE0E is “variation selector 15” and it is used to explicitly specify the text/non-graphic version and U+FE0F, “variation selector 16” gives you the emoji/graphic version. Watch (U+231A) is a good example of this. It’s at the discretion of the OS on how to render a glyph. In this case U+231A is rendered in the emoji style of an Apple Watch⌚️by default. When combined with U+FE0E, it turns into ye olde Mac OS watch ⌚︎, this is the “text version”. Adding U+FE0F does nothing to change the appearance since it was already rendered in the emoji style without it.
If you’d like to search for every character with a variation selector that is tracked in macOS’s database, you can run this query: clui -Sc U+FE0E U+FE0F A definitive list can be found here.
Encoding Options
So far we’ve just seen the default uppercase hexadecimal (-Eh) UTF-8 encoding. In the vein of shef, clui can output in various styles of encoding: \x hex escapes (-Ex), octal \nnn (-Eo), leading zero octal \0nnn (-E0), UTF-16 Javascript encoding (-u) and zsh style UTF-32 \U code points (-EU).
Surfing safari, encoding party! 🤙
Formatting output
Besides the beautiful RTF output and functional CSV output, clui can also output characters simply space delimited, without any other data (-Oc).
JSON (-Oj) and JSON Sequences (-OJ) can be had as well. The difference between JSON and JSON Sequence is that JSON will be an array of objects, whereas JSON Sequences are JSON objects delimited with U+1E the “record separator” as ASCII calls it or “information separator two” as Unicode knows it to be and newlines. Both jq and jpt can handle JSON sequneces.
JSON (-Oj)
JSON Sequence (-OJ)
Lastly we have YAML (-Oy) the superset cousin of JSON. My JSON string encoder jse gets some use in clui to encode strings and descriptions for these output modes.
YAML, cousin of JSON
Making it work for you (and me)
I spent a lot of time trying to make clui work in an intuitive way, it replicates the core features of Character Viewer with plenty of bonus functionality thrown in. It may not be something you use daily, but it might come in handy when you get an email from let’s say, tim@аррlе.com. You could run that string through clui in “expand” mode (-x) to analyze on each letter in the string. You might be surprised and perhaps disappointed that perhaps “Tim Apple” did not send you that email.
Cyrillic look-a-likes! 🔎
Or maybe you’d like to figure out the secrets of Zalgo Text or perhaps what characters are in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or make a catalog of Emoji in RTF: clui can do it! Head on over to the clui Github page and download the Release if you’d like to try it out on your (Monterey+) Mac, thanks!
Bonus
Since you made it down here, how about a one-liner that will create RTFs of all the Unicode categories? It will likely take several hours and will open a Finder window when finished.
#make RTFs of every Unicode category, this might take a few hours, if you want to cancel close the Terminal window
mkdir ~/Desktop/clui-rtfs; cd ~/Desktop/clui-rtfs; IFS=$'\n'; for category in $(clui -LC | grep Unicode,); do clui -Or -C "$category" > "$category.rtf"; done; open -R .
Computers are “the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds” as Steve Job once said. Sure enough, like a bicycle, they also require maintenance! Sometimes that requires soliciting the user to take action. Asking at the right time is very important (see my post Don’t Be a Jerk) and so is brevity. I’ve found a sprinkling of emoji and other symbols can help your message cut through the noise. A bright red stop sign 🛑 can convey its meaning with only a glance, especially for non-native speakers of your language. Your tooling however, may trip you up and mangle your text.
While AppleScript, Swift Dialog and JamfHelper can all handle Unicode, Jamf databases tables by default do not support 4-byte Unicode! I touched on this in my post: jpt 1.0 text encoding fun. While the database engine might support it, chances are your tables are Latin1 which top out at 3-byte UTF-8 encoded characters. 4-byte characters get mangled. Let’s take a look at this in action:
Looks good while editing…
Once saved, the mangling is clear
Only the gear makes it through because it’s actually two 3-byte characters (U+2699 ⚙ gear plus variation selector U+FE0F) but who has time to check which one is which? How about an encoding tool written in shell, that allows you to escape and format Unicode for shell scripts and/or Jamf script parameters that can make it through unscathed and un-mangled? Sound good? Great! I present shef, the Shell Encoder and Formatter!
Give it some text, specify an encoding scheme and/or quoting style and out comes your string ready for use! You can put the resulting string in your script as a variable or as a script parameter in a Jamf policy depending on quoting options. I’ve done the hard work of finding the various ways to escape special characters for shell and made this handy script for you!
shef Examples
First, let’s make a simple script for Jamf that processes the output of shef. I’ve chosen AppleScript so you can play along at home even if you don’t have Jamf installed, this can also be applied to “wrapper scripts” that leverage other tools like Swift Dialog or JamfHelper. At it’s heart is the simple technique of encoding the input with shef then decoding it in the script before presentation. If you use bash use echo -e if you use sh or zsh then just echo will work, it’s that simple. Our example script simpleAlert-AS.sh, keeps things small and as minimal as possible but keep in mind my fuller-featured tool shui for more robust scripts where you may need text or password entry, file picking, etc. without external dependencies but don’t want to bother learning AppleScript.
#!/bin/bash
#simpleAlert-AS - Copyright (c) 2023 Joel Bruner (https://github.com/brunerd)
#Licensed under the MIT License
#Simple Applescript alert dialog for Jamf - just a title, a message and an OK button
#Accepts hex (\xnn) and octal (\0nnn) escaped UTF-8 encoded characters (since the default Jamf db character set mangles 4 byte Unicode)
#Use shef to encode your strings/files for use in this script: https://github.com/brunerd/shef
#function to interpret the escapes and fixup characters that can screw up Applescript if unescaped \ and "
function interpretEscapesFixBackslashesAndQuotes()(echo -e "${@}" | sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/g' -e 's/"/\\"/g')
function jamflog(){
local logFile="/var/log/jamf.log"
#if we cannot write to the log or it does not exist, unset and tee simply echoes
[ ! -w "${logFile}" ] && unset logFile
#this will tee to jamf.log in the jamf log format: <Day> <Month> DD HH:MM:SS <Computer Name> ProcessName[PID]: <Message>
echo "$(date +'%a %b %d %H:%M:%S') ${myComputerName:="$(scutil --get ComputerName)"} ${myName:="$(basename "${0}" | sed 's/\..*$//')"}[${myPID:=$$}]: ${1}" | tee -a "${logFile}" 2>/dev/null
}
#process our input then escape for AppleScript
message=$(interpretEscapesFixBackslashesAndQuotes "${4}")
title=$(interpretEscapesFixBackslashesAndQuotes "${5}")
#could be a path or a built-in icon (stop, caution, note)
icon="${6}"
#invoke the system open command with this argument (URL, preference pane, etc...)
open_item="${7}"
#these are the plain icons (Applescript otherwise badges them with the calling app)
case "${icon}" in
"stop") icon="/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/AlertStopIcon.icns";;
"caution") icon="/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/AlertCautionIcon.icns"
#previous icon went away in later macOS RIP
[ ! -f "${icon}" ] && icon="/System/Library/CoreServices/Problem Reporter.app/Contents/Resources/ProblemReporter.icns";;
"note") icon="/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/AlertNoteIcon.icns";;
esac
#make string only if path is valid (otherwise dialog fails)
if [ -f "${icon}" ]; then
withIcon_AS="with icon file (POSIX file \"${icon}\")"
fi
jamflog "Prompting user: $(stat -f %Su /dev/console)"
#prompt the user, giving up and moving on after 1 day (86400 seconds)
/usr/bin/osascript <<-EOF
activate
with timeout of 86400 seconds
display dialog "${message}" with title "${title}" ${withIcon_AS} buttons {"OK"} default button "OK" giving up after "86400"
end timeout
EOF
if [ -n "${open_item}" ]; then
jamflog "Opening: ${open_item}"
open "${open_item}"
fi
exit 0
Upload the above script to your Jamf (if you have one), label parameters 4, 5, 6, and 7 as: Message, Title, Icon Path, an Open After OK, respectively. If running local keep this in mind and put 1, 2, 3 as place holder arguments for the first three parameters.
Jamf Script parameters names for
Let’s come up with an example message for our users. How about the common refrain coming from MacAdmins around the world:
🛑 Stop. ⚙️ Run your updates. 🙏 Thanks!
Now if I tried to pass this text to a script within a Jamf policy, all those emoji would get mangled by Jamf as we saw above. Let’s use shef to encode the string for Jamf:
% shef <<'EOF'
heredoc> 🛑 Stop.
heredoc> ⚙️ Run your updates.
heredoc> 🙏 Thanks!
heredoc> EOF
\xF0\x9F\x9B\x91 Stop.\n\xE2\x9A\x99\xEF\xB8\x8F Run your updates.\n\xF0\x9F\x99\x8F Thanks!
For the example above I am using a “here-doc”; in practice you can simply supply shef a file path. The output encodes all the newlines in the ANSI-C style of \n and the emoji have all been replaced by their UTF-8 encodings using the hexadecimal escaping of \x. We can take this output and use it in our Jamf policy. The message will get through both textually and symbolically. As an additional feature bonus I added a simple open action in the script. Supply the file path to the Software Update panel and after the user clicks OK, it will be opened. Scope a policy like this to anyone with pending updates with Daily frequency:
Escape the mangling in Jamf!
If you are just running the script locally and calling from the Terminal you’ll want to specify a quoting option. Exclamations are tricky and shells usually love to interpret trailing exclamations as a history expansion command, shef does its best to avoid this:
bash-3.2$ shef -Qd <<'EOF'
> 🛑 Stop.
> ⚙️ Run your updates.
> 🙏 Thanks!
> EOF
"\xF0\x9F\x9B\x91 Stop.\n\xE2\x9A\x99\xEF\xB8\x8F Run your updates.\n\xF0\x9F\x99\x8F Thanks"\!""
bash-3.2$ ./simpleAlert-AS.sh 1 2 3 "\xF0\x9F\x9B\x91 Stop.\n\xE2\x9A\x99\xEF\xB8\x8F Run your updates.\n\xF0\x9F\x99\x8F Thanks"\!"" "Software Updates Pending" stop "/System/Library/PreferencePanes/SoftwareUpdate.prefPane"
Our un-mangled output
Stop the Mangling Madness!
Wrapping things up: use shef to encode strings with Unicode so they survive storage in Jamf’s Latin1 encoded db tables. shui my fuller featured AppleScript dialog tool is ready to accept shef encoded strings. You can also use shef minify your text for your shell script. In fact, I used it to encode the help text file down to a single quoted line for use within itself. That’s 1 happy customer and counting, hope you find it useful too!
Every year Mac admins wonder which Macs will make the cut for the new MacOS. While it’s no mystery which models those are, if you’ve got Jamf you’ll be wondering how to best scope to those Macs so you can perhaps offer the upgrade in Self Service or alert the user to request a new Mac! One way to scope a Smart Group is with the Model Identifier criteria and the regex operator, like this one (I even chipped in!). It doesn’t require an inventory and results are near instant. Before I was any good at regex though, I took another route and made an Extension Attribute macOSCompatibility.sh, where the Mac reports back to Jamf. (It also has a CSV output mode for nerdy fun!) Both methods however require manual upkeep and are now somewhat complicated by Apple’s new use of the very generic Macxx,xx model identifier which doesn’t seem to follow the usual model name and number scheme of major version and minor form factor variants (on purpose me-thinks!). Let’s look at some new methods that don’t require future upkeep.
Using softwareupdate –list-full-installers
macOS Big Sur (11) introduced a new command softwareupdate--list-full-installers which shows all eligible installers available for download by the Mac running that command. The funny thing about this is that even though it is a Big Sur or newer feature, if the hardware is old enough, like a 2017, it offer versions all the way back to 10.13 High Sierra! Monterey added build numbers to the output and it can be easily reduced to just versions with awk:
This one-liner can be made into a simple function. I’ve added a uniq at the end for case where two differing builds have the same version, like 10.15.7. Here’s that function in a script with a little version check: getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU.sh
#!/bin/sh
: <<-LICENSE_BLOCK
getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU - Copyright (c) 2022 Joel Bruner
Licensed under the MIT License
LICENSE_BLOCK
function getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU()(
#getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU - uses softwareupdate to determine compatible macOS versions for the Mac host that runs this
if [ "$(sw_vers -productVersion | cut -d. -f1)" -lt 11 ]; then echo "Error: macOS 11+ required" >&2; return 1; fi
#get full installers and strip out all other columns
softwareupdate --list-full-installers 2>/dev/null | awk -F 'Version: |, Size' '/Title:/{print $2}' | uniq
)
getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU
Output from Apple Silicon will never include 10.x versions
Software Update (SWU) Based Extension Attribute for Jamf
The possible inclusion of 10.x versions in the output complicates things a bit. In ye olden OS X days, the “minor version” (after the first period) acted more like the major versions of today! Still it can be done, and we will output any macOS 10.x versions, as if they are major versions like macOS 11, 12, 13, etc. Here’s getSupportedMacOSVersions-SWU-EA.sh
#!/bin/sh
: <<-LICENSE_BLOCK
getSupportedMacOSVersions-SWU-EA (Extension Attribute) - Copyright (c) 2022 Joel Bruner
Licensed under the MIT License
LICENSE_BLOCK
function getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU()(
#getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU - uses softwareupdate to determine compatible macOS versions for the Mac host that runs this
#[ "$(sw_vers -productVersion | cut -d. -f1)" -lt 11 ] && return 1
if [ "$(sw_vers -productVersion | cut -d. -f1)" -lt 11 ]; then echo "Error: macOS 11+ required" >&2; return 1; fi
#get full installers and strip out all other columns
softwareupdate --list-full-installers 2>/dev/null | awk -F 'Version: |, Size' '/Title:/{print $2}'
)
#get our version
all_versions=$(getSupportedMacOSVersions_SWU)
#depending on the model (2020 and under) we might still get some 10.x versions
if grep -q ^10 <<< "${all_versions}" ; then versions_10=$(awk -F. '/^10/{print $1"."$2}' <<< "${all_versions}")$'\n'; fi
#all the other major versions
version_others=$(awk -F. '/^1[^0]/{print $1}' <<< "${all_versions}")
#echo without double quotes to convert newlines to spaces
echo "<result>"$(sort -V <<< "${versions_10}${version_others}" | uniq)"</result>"
The venerable 2017 MacBook Pro has quite a span
Now if you wanted to make a Jamf Smart Group for those that could run macOS 13 you wouldn’t want to match 10.13 by accident. You could comment out the line in the script that matches versions beginning with ^10 or you could enclose everything in double quotes for the echo on the last line, so the newlines remained or you could use regex to match ([^.]|^)13 that is: not.13 or if the hardware is so new ^13 is at the very beginning of the string. As 10.x capable hardware fades away such regex sorcery shouldn’t be needed.
Using the Apple Software Lookup Service
“What’s the Apple Software Lookup Service?!”, you may be asking? I myself asked the same question! It’s a highly available JSON file that MDM servers can reference. If softwareupdate is acting up or hanging (and it’s been known to do so!), you have all you need in this JSON file to do a little sanity checking of softwareupdate too if you’d like. The URL is found in the Apple MDM Protocol Reference and it contains versions, models and their compatibility.
This method has far fewer patch and point versions than the softwareupdate method above and the OSes start with Big Sur (11). No 10.x versions are in the ASLS. There are two “sets” in ASLS, PublicAssetSets, which has only the newest release of each major version and AssetSets which has additional point releases (use the -a option for this one). plutil has quirky (IMO) rules for what it will and will not output as json but the raw output type can get around. It was introduced in Monterey and it can also be used to count array members, it’s goofy but manageable. Richard Purves has an article on that here. The code is generously commented, so I won’t expound upon it too much more, here’s getSupportedMacOSVersions_ASLS.sh
#!/bin/sh
: <<-LICENSE_BLOCK
getSupportedMacOSVersions_ASLS - Copyright (c) 2022 Joel Bruner
Licensed under the MIT License...
LICENSE_BLOCK
function getSupportedMacOSVersions_ASLS()(
#getSupportMacOSVersions - uses Apple Software Lookup Service to determine compatible macOS versions for the Mac host that runs this
# Options:
# [-a] - to see "all" versions including prior point releases, otherwise only newest of each major version shown
if [ "${1}" = "-a" ]; then
setName="AssetSets"
else
setName="PublicAssetSets"
fi
#get Device ID for Apple Silicon or Board ID for Intel
case "$(arch)" in
"arm64")
#NOTE: Output on ARM is Device ID (J314cAP) but on Intel output is Model ID (MacBookPro14,3)
myID=$(ioreg -arc IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 1 | plutil -extract 0.IORegistryEntryName raw -o - -)
;;
"i386")
#Intel only, Board ID (Mac-551B86E5744E2388)
myID=$(ioreg -arc IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 1 | plutil -extract 0.board-id raw -o - - | base64 -D)
;;
esac
#get JSON data from "Apple Software Lookup Service" - https://developer.apple.com/business/documentation/MDM-Protocol-Reference.pdf
JSONData=$(curl -s https://gdmf.apple.com/v2/pmv)
#get macOS array count
arrayCount=$(plutil -extract "${setName}.macOS" raw -o - /dev/stdin <<< "${JSONData}")
#look for our device/board ID in each array member and add to list if found
for ((i=0; i<arrayCount; i++)); do
#if found by grep in JSON (this is sufficient)
if grep -q \"${myID}\" <<< "$(plutil -extract "${setName}.macOS.${i}.SupportedDevices" json -o - /dev/stdin <<< "${JSONData}")"; then
#add macOS version to the list
supportedVersions+="${newline}$(plutil -extract "${setName}.macOS.${i}.ProductVersion" raw -o - /dev/stdin <<< "${JSONData}")"
#only set for the next entry, so no trailing newlines
newline=$'\n'
fi
done
#echo out the results sorted in descending order (newest on top)
sort -rV <<< "${supportedVersions}"
)
#pass possible "-a" argument
getSupportedMacOSVersions_ASLS "$@"
PublicAssetSets (top) vs. AssetSets (bottom)
The fact that this method requires Monterey for the plutil stuff didn’t agree with me, so I made a version that uses my JSON power tool (jpt) so it will work on all earlier OSes too. It’s a tad large (88k) but still runs quite fast: getSupportedMacOSVersions_ASLS-legacy.sh
Just as with the softwareupdate based function, the same can be done to reduce the output to only major versions and since it is v11 and up, a simple cut will do!
The Apple Software Lookup Service (ASLS) JSON file itself doesn’t care what version of macOS a client is on, but the methods in plutil to work with JSON aren’t available until Monterey. So here’s the ASLS based Extension Attribute a couple ways: getSupportedMacOSVersions-ASLS-EA.sh and getSupportedMacOSVersions-ASLS-legacy-EA.sh both get the job done.
Same. Same.
Bonus Methods for Determining Board ID and Device ID
The ASLS method requires either the Board ID or the Device ID and in a way that worked across all macOS versions and hardware architectures. I’ve updated my gist for that (although gists are a worse junk drawer than a bunch of scripts in a repo if only because it’s hard to get an overall listing) and here’s a few callouts for what I came up with
#DeviceID - ARM, UNIVERSAL - uses xmllint --xpath
myDeviceID=$(ioreg -arc IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 1 | plutil -extract 0.IORegistryEntryName xml1 -o - - | xmllint --xpath '/plist/string/text()' - 2>/dev/null)
#DeviceID - ARM, macOS 12+ only, uses plutil raw output
myDeviceID=$(ioreg -arc IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 1 | plutil -extract 0.IORegistryEntryName raw -o - -)
#NOTE: Different output depending on platform!
# ARM gets the Device ID - J314cAP
# Intel gets the Model ID - MacBookPro14,3
#Board ID - Intel ONLY, Mac-551B86E5744E2388
#Intel, UNIVERSAL - uses xmllint --xpath
myBoardID=$(ioreg -arc IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 1 | plutil -extract 0.board-id xml1 -o - - | xmllint --xpath '/plist/data/text()' - | base64 -D)
#Intel, macOS 12+ only - uses plutil raw output
myBoardID=$(ioreg -arc IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 1 | plutil -extract 0.board-id raw -o - - | base64 -D)
Wrapping Up
This was all really an excuse to play around with the Apple Software Lookup Service JSON file, what can I say! And not just to plug jpt either! It was fun to use the new plutil raw type too (is fun the right word?) and “live off the land”. Be aware that the newest macOS version only appears once it’s publicly released, so keep that in mind when scoping. You can still keep scoping in Jamf via Model Identifier Regex or by my older extension attribute just keep in mind you’ll need to update them yearly. Whereas, these newer EAs based on either softwareupate (getSupportedMacOSVersions-SWU-EA.sh) or ASLS (getSupportedMacOSVersions-ASLS-EA.sh, getSupportedMacOSVersions-ASLS-legacy-EA.sh) should take care of themselves into the future.
Lockdown mode is new feature for macOS Ventura and for many MacAdmins we’ve been wondering how to detect this state. Why? Lockdown mode affects how macOS and Mac apps behave. This is something a helpdesk might like to know when trying to troubleshoot an issue. Also, due to some ambiguous wording by Apple, they made it seem like MDM Config Profiles could not be installed at all when in Lockdown mode, however this is not always the case. The hunt was on!
Detecting Lockdown Mode
I was looking everywhere last week: ps process lists, nvram, system_profiler, kextstat, launchctl, sysdiagnose, a defaults read dump, etc. I was looking high and low for “lock” “down” and “mode” and I got a hit in the com.apple.Safari domain in the sandboxed ~/Library/Containers/Safari path. While it turns out that Safari will in some cases write the button label LockdownModeToolbarIdentifier to that pref domain, it requires Safari to be launched and for the toolbar to be in non-default layout, otherwise the label name is never written! So that was a dead end.
Then a little birdie on MacAdmins pointed me in the right direction and blogged about it and wrote a Jamf extension attribute! 😅 Turns out I had missed the value sitting at the top of the defaults read dump! (d’oh) It was there the whole time in .GlobalPreferences, I just hadn’t done a diff like I should have! That would have revealed the key uses the LDM acronym/mnemonic: LDMGlobalEnabled Funnily enough, when I searched for this key on Google I got 5 hits and all of them for iOS, like this one at the Apple dev forums. However they were all about Swift and iOS, here’s how to do it in shell for the current user:
It’s a boolean value, that will not exist if Lockdown mode has never been enabled, when enabled it will report 1 from defaults and when disabled the key will remain and report 0. What stands out is that this is a per-user preference. Since it makes you reboot I had supposed it was a system-wide setting but sure enough if you log out and into another user, Lockdown mode is disabled. Perhaps that makes sense but I’m not quite sure about that?
Affecting Lockdown Mode
This totally blew me away: You can enable and disable macOS Lockdown mode by writing to your .GlobalPreferences preference domain!
#turn lockdown mode off
defaults write .GlobalPreferences.plist LDMGlobalEnabled -bool false
#turn lockdown mode on
defaults write .GlobalPreferences.plist LDMGlobalEnabled -bool true
That’s right, it’s not written to a rootless/SIP protected file like TCC.db! Just run the command as the user and it’ll turn toggle the behavior for most things. Here’s some details of my findings:
Configuration profiles – a restart of System Settings is not required, it will prohibit the manual installation of a .mobileconfig profile file. When Apple says “Configuration profiles can’t be installed” this is what they mean: User installed “double-click” installations of .mobileconfig files cannot be done. When they say “the device can’t be enrolled in Mobile Device Management or device supervision while in Lockdown Mode”, this only applies to these user-initiated MDM enrollments using a web browser that downloads .mobileconfig files. Lockdown mode does not prohibit enrollment into MDM that’s assigned via Apple Business Manager (ABM/DEP). You can initiate enrollment with the Terminal command: sudo profiles renew -type enrollment A Mac in Lockdown mode will be able to successfully enroll into an MDM assigned by ABM. Once enrolled, new Config Profiles can also be installed via that same MDM, even in Lockdown Mode.
Messages – a restart of Messages is not required, all messages will be blocked immediately, attachments or not. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or not since Apple only mentions attachments, not plain messages. It does not matter if the sender is in your Contacts or whether you have initiated contact with them before (like in Facetime). Messages will be delivered to any other devices not in Lockdown mode. If Lockdown mode is turned off, those blocked messages may be delivered if sent recently enough but will appear out of sequence. For example, a device that never had Lockdown Mode turned on would see messages: 1,2,3,4,5 while a device that turns it on and then off would see: 1,2,5,3,4
Facetime – restart not required, it will immediately begin blocking calls from anyone you have not called previously from that device. Unlike Messages though, it will show a Notification of the blockage.
Safari – app restart required. This differs from everything else, however Safari also gives the best visual indications that Lockdown mode is enabled! On the Start Page you’ll see “Lockdown Ready”, once at at website you’ll likely see “Lockdown Enabled” unless you’ve uncheck Enable Lockdown Mode in the top menubar Safari → Settings for <site>… in which case you’ll see “Lockdown Off” in red.
Safari’s Lockdown Mode Toolbar states
Safari – Another subtle visual cue of Lockdown mode, that aligns with Apple’s “web fonts might not be displayed” guidance, can be seen on a Jamf user-initiated MDM enrollment screen, instead of a check mark you’ll see a square, take heed and turn back now! Since once you get the .mobileconfig files and fumble your way to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom of the list to Profiles (UX gripe: it used to just open the dang panel when you double clicked on them!) you’ll be blocked from installing it as seen above.
System Settings – an app restart is required for Privacy & Security to reflect the current state of LDMGlobalEnabled, if it was on and you disable via defaults once you launch System Settings again, it’ll let you turn it back on with a reboot and everything!
Wrapping Up
I didn’t try out the other lockdown mode behaviors for things like new Home management invitations or Shared Albums in Photos. Still it’s quite surprising that despite the System Settings GUI making you reboot to turn it on, Lockdown mode is a per-user setting that can seemingly be enabled and disabled dynamically with a simple defaults command run by the user. With the exception of Safari and System Settings it does not require Messages and Facetime to restart! There might be other caveats, it’s hard to tell. Perhaps this is all in the realm of “works as designed” for Apple but when you, the customer, don’t know what that exact design is, it can be quite a surprise!
Update: Looks like they started explaining a bit more about what happens when you enabled Lockdown Mode in macOS Sonoma
One more (unrelated) thing…
Update: As of Dec 13, 2022 Bug 174931 – Implement RegExp lookbehind assertions has been marked “Resolved” and the extensive pull request has all the gory details of the extensive refactoring that was done to implement this. 🎉 Thanks Michael Saboff! 🙏 Now when this will make it into Safari…. we’ll see.
Update 2:Safari 16.4, released March 27, 2023, now supports RegExp lookbehind assertions!
Since this post might get a few eyeballs, I’d also like to shine a light on the perplexing fact that Safari is the only browser that still doesn’t support the four year old ES2018 feature of RegExp lookbehind assertions?! I mean, sure it was a Google engineer who kindly filed this heads up to the WebKit team back in July of 2017 when it was a draft and a full year before it was ratified (Bug 174931 – Implement RegExp lookbehind assertions) but even a silly corporate rivalry couldn’t explain the seeming obstinance in letting this feature languish. I don’t get it, it just doesn’t make sense! There’s a nicely visualized page of where things stand and Safari is keeping company with IE 11 on this one.
Make these red islands green, Apple!
So take a look at the comments on the WebKit bug, some are quitefunny, others just spoton, and there’s even one from yours truly. Perhaps add your own? Maybe when a bug gets 100 comments something special happens and we all get cake? 🎂
Adobe Creative Cloud app can get in weird state that blocks users from seeing their apps.
The official solution from Adobe is to delete the file /Library/Application Support/Adobe/OOBE/Configs/ServiceConfig.xml and “restart” Adobe CC, however in the real world you need to sign out and sign back in for the fix to take effect. The folks in the Adobe forums also found that you can change the value of the AppsPanel key from false to true and that does the trick too. Either way it still requires the user to sign-out of Adobe CC and back in.
Now, if you are a MacAdmin with a script that either deletes or modifies ServiceConfig.xml, you will ideally tell the user to Sign Out of Creative Cloud for the fix to take effect. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to check they’ve done so and prompt them appropriately (or not)? For sure, right!?
There’s a per-user file with ideal behavior, that gets created upon sign-in and removed upon sign out: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Creative Cloud\ Libraries/LIBS/librarylookupfile While its presence shouldn’t be taken as absolute proof that the sign-In is valid, it can be helpful when you need to alert the user what their next steps are. Here’s a simple example that just echoes out the status:
#!/bin/bash
#consoleHasAdobeCCSignIn - Copyright (c) 2022 Joel Bruner - MIT License
function consoleHasAdobeCCSignIn()(
consoleUser=$(stat -f %Su /dev/console)
#if root grab the last console user
if [ "${consoleUser}" = "root" ]; then
consoleUser=$(/usr/bin/last -1 -t console | awk '{print $1}')
fi
sudo -u ${consoleUser} sh -c 'ls ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Creative\ Cloud\ Libraries/LIBS/librarylookupfile &>/dev/null'
return $?
)
if consoleHasAdobeCCSignIn; then
result="Signed In"
else
result="Signed Out"
fi
echo "Adobe CC status ($(stat -f %Su /dev/console)): $result"
Example output
In a fully fleshed out script you could use my shell function shui to pop-up a sharp looking AppleScript alert to your user if they need to sign out or just sign in. You can even use the icon in your pop-up.
You could also use the consoleHasAdobeCCSignIn function in a Jamf Extension Attribute for tracking which Macs have actually signed into Adobe CC and possibly reclaim unused licenses. I’ll leave the uses and script cobbling to you the reader, as an exercise. Thanks for reading!
I’m on a roll with iCloud stuff. In this post I’d like to show you how you can determine if either iCloud Drive is enabled along with the “Desktop and Documents Folders” sync feature. While you can use MDM to turn these off, perhaps you like to know who you’d affect first! Perhaps the folks in your Enterprise currently using these features are in the C-Suite? I’m sure they’d appreciate a heads up before all their iCloud docs get removed from their Macs (when MDM disallowance takes affect it is swift and unforgiving).
iCloud Drive Status
When it comes to using on-disk artifacts to figure out the state of macOS I like to use the analogy of reading tea leaves. Usually it’s pretty straightforward but every now and then there’s something inscrutable and you have to take your best guess. For example iCloud Drive status is stored in your home folder at ~/Library/Preferences/MobileMeAccounts.plist but yet the Accounts key is an array. The question is how and why you could even have more than one iCloud account signed-in?! Perhaps a reader will tell me when and how you would ever have more than one? For now it seems inexplicable.
Update: It seems quite obvious now but as many folks did point out, of course you can add another iCloud account to Internet Accounts and it can sync Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes, just not iCloud Drive. Only one iCloud Drive user per user on a Mac. While I do have another AppleID I only use it for Media and Purchases and none of the other iCloud services. The code below stays the same as it is looking at all array entries. Aside: Boy, do I wish I could merge or transfer my old iTunes purchasing/media Apple ID with my main iCloud Apple ID! <weakly shakes fist at faceless Apple bureaucracy that for some reason hasn't solved the problem of merging Apple IDs>
#!/bin/bash
#Joel Bruner - iCloudDrive.func.sh - gets the iCloud Drive status for a console user
#############
# FUNCTIONS #
#############
function iCloudDrive()(
#for brevity pretend we've pasted in the minified jpt function:
#https://github.com/brunerd/jpt/blob/main/sources/jpt.min
#for the full function see https://github.com/brunerd/macAdminTools/tree/main/Scripts
consoleUser=$(stat -f %Su /dev/console)
#if root grab the last console user
if [ "${consoleUser}" = "root" ]; then
consoleUser=$(/usr/bin/last -1 -t console | awk '{print $1}')
fi
userPref_json=$(sudo -u $consoleUser defaults export MobileMeAccounts - | plutil -convert json - -o -)
#pref domain not found an empty object is returned
if [ "${userPref_json}" = "{}" ]; then
return 1
else
#returns the number paths that match
matchingPathCount=$(jpt -r '$.Accounts[*].Services[?(@.Name == "MOBILE_DOCUMENTS" && @.Enabled == true)]' <<< "${userPref_json}" 2>/dev/null | wc -l | tr -d "[[:space:]]")
if [ ${matchingPathCount:=0} -eq 0 ]; then
return 1
else
return 0
fi
fi
)
########
# MAIN #
########
#example function usage, if leverages the return values
if iCloudDrive; then
echo "iCloud Drive is ON"
exit 0
else
echo "iCloud Drive is OFF"
exit 1
fi
The magic happens once we’ve gotten the JSON version of MobileMeAccount.plist I use jpt to see if there are any objects within the Accounts array with Services that have both a Name that matches MOBILE_DOCUMENTSand have an Enabled key that is set to true, the -r option on jpt tells it to output the the JSON Pointer path(s) the query matches. I could have used the -j option to output JSONPath(s) but either way a line is a line and that’s all we need. Altogether it looks like this: jpt -r '$.Accounts[*].Services[?(@.Name == "MOBILE_DOCUMENTS" && @.Enabled == true)]
Again because Accounts is an Array we have it look at all of them with $.Accounts[*]and in the off chance we get more than one we simply say if the number of matches is greater than zero then it’s on. This works very well in practice. This function could best be used as a JAMF Extension Attribute. I’ll leave that as a copy/paste exercise for the reader. Add it to your Jamf Pro EAs, let sit for 24-48 hours and check for results! ⏲ And while some of you might balk at a 73k Extensions Attribute, the execution time is on average a speedy .15s!
#!/bin/bash
#a pretend iCloudDrive Jamf EA
#pretend we've pasted in the function iCloudDrive() above
if iCloudDrive; then
result="ON"
else
result="OFF"
fi
echo "<result>${result}</result>"
iCloud Drive “Desktop and Documents” status
Thankfully, slightly easier to determine yet devilishly subtle to discover, is determining the status of the “Desktop and Documents” sync feature of iCloud Drive. After searching in vain for plist artifacts, I discovered the clue is in the extended attributes of your Desktop (and/or Documents) folder! You can find the scripts at my GitHub here iCloudDriveDesktopSync_func.sh and the minified version iCloudDriveDesktopSync_func min.sh
#!/bin/bash
#Joel Bruner - iCloudDriveDesktopSync - gets the iCloud Drive Desktop and Document Sync Status for the console user
#############
# FUNCTIONS #
#############
#must be run as root
function iCloudDriveDesktopSync()(
consoleUser=$(stat -f %Su /dev/console)
#if root (loginwindow) grab the last console user
if [ "${consoleUser}" = "root" ]; then
consoleUser=$(/usr/bin/last -1 -t console | awk '{print $1}')
fi
#if this xattr exists then sync is turned on
xattr_desktop=$(sudo -u $consoleUser /bin/sh -c 'xattr -p com.apple.icloud.desktop ~/Desktop 2>/dev/null')
if [ -z "${xattr_desktop}" ]; then
return 1
else
return 0
fi
)
#example function usage, if leverages the return values
if iCloudDriveDesktopSync; then
echo "iCloud Drive Desktop and Documents Sync is ON"
exit 0
else
echo "iCloud Drive Desktop and Documents Sync is OFF"
exit 1
fi
The operation is pretty simple, it finds a console user or last user, then runs the xattr -p command as that user (anticipating this being run as root by Jamf) to see if the com.apple.icloud.desktop extended attribute exists on their ~/Desktop. In testing you’ll find if you toggle the “Desktop and Documents” checkbox in the iCloud Drive options, it will apply this to both of those folders almost immediately without fail. The function can be used in a Jamf Extension Attribute in the same way the iCloudDrive was above. Some assembly required. 💪
So, there you go! Another couple functions to read the stateful tea leaves of iCloud Drive settings. Very useful if you are about to disallow iCloud Drive and/or Desktop and Document sync via MDM but need to know who you are going to affect and let them know beforehand. Because I still stand by this sage advice: Don’t Be A Jerk. Thanks for reading you can find these script and more at my GitHub repo. Thanks for reading!
