macOS Programmatically determining application versions

[frankpuccino]

Suppose I want to determine the versions of applications that are installed on a user's machine.

Is it "correct" to take the application's bundle identifier, go to the application bundle directory, and then pull the Info.plist out of the bundle and look at the version number there?

Or is there a better way?

Frank

 

[chown33]

http://developer.apple.com/mac/libr...nchServicesReference/Reference/reference.html

 

[Peter Maurer]

If you only need this to work with apps that are packaged as bundles, you can also just use NSBundle, e.g.:

[[NSBundle bundleWithPath: @"/path/to/an.app"] objectForInfoDictionaryKey: @"CFBundleShortVersionString"]

 

[robbieduncan]

The terminal command

system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType -xml

will produce an XML file with all app details. You can redirect this to a file, parse it with an XML parser, whatever