akweteco01: A script to keep Flash Player up to date

Saturday, May 7, 2011

A script to keep Flash Player up to date

Frequent security updates to Flash prompted me to write this script to keep Flash current on Intel Macs that I manage. While more recent versions of Flash can be configured to notify end users of available updates, this script will silently check and upgrade to a newer version if one is available.

It works by checking the installed version of Flash (if any) against the version number available for Mac Safari/Firefox/Opera on Adobe's About Flash page. If the two are different, it downloads the DMG of the latest Flash installer to the same folder where the script resides, silently mounts the DMG, and executes the installer package buried in the 'Install Flash' application. It runs completely silently and will log all of its activities to a file for later review. If Flash is not present, it will be installed on the system. In its current form it will not advise users to quit their browsers, because it was written to be run during off hours on machines sitting at the login win ...