Apple

On Nov 18, 2009, at 3:47 PM, Christopher Stone wrote:

On Nov 17, 2009, at 18:20, Joshua Whalen wrote:
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.22/22.03/StoringandAccessingData/index.html

I'm glad this thread got started. I'd been meaning to do this research forever.
______________________________________________________________________

Hey Folks,

I'll second Joshua on this.

For some time now I've been using the Finder to get the short version string of applications for a script I use regularly. Unfortunately the Finder and System Events don't always produce the string that can be seen readily in the Finder's Get-Info dialog.

Parsing the application bundle's Info.plist for the value of CFBundleShortVersionString seems like the more reliable way to go and using information from the recently posted link to Ben Waldie's article at MacTech let me do this neatly with System Events.

tell application "System Events"
tell property list file fPath
tell contents
set shortVersionString to value of property list item "CFBundleShortVersionString"
end tell
end tell
end tell

Serendipity. :)

Two, AppleScript supports this particular case directly these days. As of Leopard, you can say "version of application ..." (and using a path for the name works too), and it'll give it to you without launching the application. In fact, it gets the CFBundleShortVersionString.

References:
	>re: XML handling (From: Joshua Whalen <email@hidden>)
	>Re: XML handling (From: Christopher Stone <email@hidden>)