Mac Update Frustrations

I like keeping my Macs up to date. Unfortunately they don’t always want to cooperate with me.

For the last few days a Mac update I was trying to install on my Macbook was stuck:

I’d tried restarting the Mac, powering it down and starting it from “cold”. No difference.

Mac OSX is not a million miles away from Linux so you can do a lot of stuff directly from the command line by firing up “terminal”.

There’s a nice little command utility available for running updates which you can invoke with the command:

softwareupdate

To do.proper installs, updates etc., however you’ll need to run the command with the right permissions:

sudo softwareupdate -ia

The “-i” means “install”, while the “-a” means “all available updates”.

Of course while that was all nice in theory, in reality my Mac was not willing to cooperate until I restarted it in “safe mode”. Basically shut it down, left it off for a few seconds and then started it up while holding the shift key.

I then ran the command and it downloaded the updates, installed them and rebooted itself.