Auto Generated Application List

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I recently had the catastrophic hard drive failure on my laptop. I now have a huge external drive that I use for TimeMachine on my Desktop and my Laptop. In order to save space backing up I want to exclude the applications folder and simply have a text file generated that will list all of the installed apps (and version-if possible). Then I would have this text file backed up instead of the xxGB sized applications folder.

Would this be easiest if done in a shell script, apple script, maybe automator can help?

Has anyone else done this? Any ideas?

Thanks!
 
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late 08 macbook 2.0 4gig 320hdd10.7.3 32 gig iPhone 4s
A question ? If you dont include your apps folder in the backup will you have any apps backed-up ? I may be wrong but you will not be saving hdd space as TM just keeps adding back ups till disk is full then starts deleting the oldest to continue. I am sure someone will come along to shoot me down or confirm but If it were me i would let time machine do its job.

Just my thoughts
Clay
 
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Correct, I'd have no Apps folder backed up. The apps really aren't my priority as far as retaining data since I have all of the media to install (sure it'll take more time to recover if the unthinkable happens again) but with a 1.5 TB backup and a desktop with 1TB and a laptop with 250GB, I'm sure it'll get full fast. No need to have the apps folder add more waste.
 
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This is actually quite simple using System Profiler. Run this command from Terminal:
Code:
system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType > ~/Desktop/Applications.txt
This will output every single application on your computer to a file on the Desktop called Applications.txt. To refine it to just the applications in your Applications folder, try something like this:
Code:
system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType | grep "Location: /Applications" -B 7 > ~/Desktop/Applications.txt
It will output a generally nice list of applications. You could even refine that further to include other folders, such as ~/Applications. Also, you can change the path to output it wherever you like, including on your backup disk somewhere.

Throw that as a do shell script in an AppleScript, set it to run on a schedule with iCal, and you'll be good to go. Here are instructions that I gave in another thread on how to assign an application to a scheduled iCal event. Just replace making an Automator script with making an AppleScript (or even do make it in Automator with a Run Applescript action), and schedule it regularly for how often you want the file to be updated.
 

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