So when Safari 6 came out, Apple did away with download links from their Support site.
Why? Who knows. But it’s a real pain when you have børked install or install a Developer preview (which sometimes will not register in Software Updates and need to get up to the latest release.)
I contributed this tip to Apple Discussions in the HT5275 Safari 6 download thread and am reposting here as well since I repeatedly keep going back to get the command I authored! (No I don’t run Apple Software Update server, I have my own distribution methods for work that don’t involve merging software update catalogs and other ridiculous things OS X Server requires you to do if you dare run various OS X versions and don’t run the latest server). I parenthetically digress.
Here’s the Terminal command to spit out some Safari6 URLs (OS X 10.6-10.8):
curl -s $(strings /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SoftwareUpdate.framework/SoftwareUpdate | grep http | grep sucatalog) | grep Safari6 | grep pkg
It’ll give you something like this:
<string>http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/18/32/041-6651/147ugedbeiqpz43czixlgawayfoa7tjyjv/Safari6.1MountainLion.pkg</string><string>http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/47/40/041-6648/a9y00qwi8esz3gl5v2gfik1p3rgvn7zftz/Safari6.1Lion.pkg</string>
I know, not pretty right? But what you can do then is copy and paste the URL into Safari’s Address/Search bar and hit Option-Enter which will then download it.
Viola. A Safari 6 package.
Update for 10.9:
Now when you grep SoftwareUpdate there are multiple URLs for the seed programs, the easiest way to deal with this and still be generic is to loop through all the URLs grepping for Safari
for URL in $(strings /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SoftwareUpdate.framework/SoftwareUpdate | grep http | grep sucatalog); do curl -s "$URL" | grep Safari | grep pkg; done