batguebi01: Track changes made with the defaults command

Monday, 4 July 2011

Track changes made with the defaults command

There are many hints that involve the use of the defaults command to change system settings. When trying to keep my Macs in sync (as well as setting up new ones), I have difficulty remembering which changes I've made. So after some work I was able to build a script that nicely tracks the changes I make to the system.

My requirements were to log any writes or deletes, showing both the old value and the new value to a log file in ~/Library/Logs/ where it is accessible to Console. (I use logger too but those messages get lost in the noise and are aged off). I wanted to leave any other defaults command (read, find, etc.) alone.

My first try was to write a function in my .bash_profile, which is loaded at every login and overrode the executable. That seemed fine until I realized that when using sudo defaults, it wasn't working. This is because sudo simply executes a command as different user without logging in and g ...