Good, better and best methods to leave and retrieve client-side breadcrumbs with Jamf Pro
As a Jamf Pro administrator managing Apple computers running macOS, you frequently need to leave a client-side record when a policy was executed, which is sometimes referred to as a “breadcrumb”; you also need an easy way to retrieve this data.
@dan-snelson Thanks as always for sharing. That people in the Jamf Pro community are willing to share their work so that others don't need to re-invent the wheel is of the major things I like about the community.
That said, a small quibble with your use of the defaults command to manipulate a plist for the "best" approach... Per the man page for defaults: "WARNING: The defaults command will be changed in an upcoming major release to only operate on preferences domains. General plist manipulation utilities will be folded into a different command-line program."
That warning has been around for a while, so who knows when Apple will finally follow through, but in order not to find out the hard way I'd suggest utilizing /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy as the plist manipulation tool instead.
@dan-snelson Thanks as always for sharing. That people in the Jamf Pro community are willing to share their work so that others don't need to re-invent the wheel is of the major things I like about the community.
That said, a small quibble with your use of the defaults command to manipulate a plist for the "best" approach... Per the man page for defaults: "WARNING: The defaults command will be changed in an upcoming major release to only operate on preferences domains. General plist manipulation utilities will be folded into a different command-line program."
That warning has been around for a while, so who knows when Apple will finally follow through, but in order not to find out the hard way I'd suggest utilizing /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy as the plist manipulation tool instead.
Thanks, @sdagley.
Per ACE Case 101657644782 from October 2022:
Apple will announce when this change is meant to happen with enough runway to adjust established workflows.
Thanks, @sdagley.
Per ACE Case 101657644782 from October 2022:
Apple will announce when this change is meant to happen with enough runway to adjust established workflows.
What Apple thinks is enough runway will be interesting to see. As one of the few people to have ever produced a product based on A/ROSE and the Macintosh Coprocessor Platform let's just say that when Apple starts making noises about something being deprecated I want to start making use of an alternative sooner rather than later.
Thanks for the info, I appreciate it.
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