Determine if any Apple Software is in the Cache

Do you have the option enabled in your JSS' inventory preferences to capture Software Updates? If so, I believe the JSS will report on available updates, and you can use the native criteria for your Smart Group.

If not, I do have some code that will tell you if updates are cached in that folder if you're interested.

I'm seeing whether there are updates available, I want to make the distinction that they have been downloaded into the cache. I'd working on policies to have the updates cached before installation.

I'd be happy to see your code :)

It looks like "ls -d /Library/Updates" would be a good way to get the data into an extension attribute. It would return all directories in that folder, and as far as I can tell the only results would be for cached updates.

You could process that result a little more to just extract the update names or get a count. That said, it would also return results for updates that are currently being downloaded but are not yet complete.

Understood. So, hopefully the following info will help you out. Inside the /Library/Updates/ folder, you'll also notice an index.plist. That plist contains a reference to the locally created folders, or product IDs when softwareupdate caches updates.
The following command prints out just those Product IDs

defaults read /Library/Updates/index.plist ProductPaths | awk -F'"' '{print $4}' | sed '/^$/d'

You should be able to compare these IDs to the actual folders that are in /Library/Updates/, so for example, I might do something like this as an Extension Attribute to get a count of the cached updates in that directory, though note that its really only looking for the folder and not really checking the contents. YMMV with that since its always possible for the content to get removed by something and the folder to remain in place.

#!/bin/bash

## Gets the number of cached updates in /Library/Updates/

while read productID; do
    if [ -d "/Library/Updates/$productID" ]; then
        cachedUpdates+=("$productID")
    fi
done < <(defaults read /Library/Updates/index.plist ProductPaths | awk -F'"' '{print $4}' | sed '/^$/d')

echo "<result>$(printf '%s
' "${#cachedUpdates[@]}")</result>"

The above should print out a number, like 0, 1, 5, etc. You should be able to use that EA to gather machines that have one or more cached updates. Again, the above could end up being incorrect if someone was to go in manually and delete some of the updates out of that folder and leave the folders themselves behind. Probably not very likely of course, but something to keep in mind anyway.

If you need something that will really verify the updates are there, there are some ways to do that as well.

Much thanks @mm2270 :

One change to the script looks like a typo: last line should be:

echo "<result>$(printf '%s
' "${#cachedUpdates[@]}")</result>"

there was an extra "s" in the last result(s)

You're right, that extra "s" shouldn't be in the closing tag. Thanks for the catch. I updated my post above so its correct.

This seems to have changed in macOS Big Sur. I tried above and does not work anymore. @mm2270 do you know a working one for Big Sur?

This is what i have so far and it is looking promising