Brew Cask Upgrade

Posted on Sunday, April 03 2016
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A couple of weeks ago I discovered that in addition to regular things you can
install complete apps that have anything even vaguely to do with programming
using:

brew cask install

And I mean vaguely. The complete list of the things I have brew installed with:

brew cask list

is:

alfred                 firefox                java               sourcetree             ubersicht
atom                   google-chrome              keepassx               spotify                virtualbox
atom-beta              intellij-idea              malwarebytes-anti-malware spotify-notifications       visualvm
betterzip              intellij-idea-ce           pgadmin3               sublime-text
cmake                  iterm2                 postico                sublime-text3
filezilla              iterm2-beta            slack              tunnelblick

Note all of the random crap like spotify.
And of course using brew, I've gotten used to automatically updating
everything with :

brew upgrade -all

However, as documenented in a couple of places on the internet, this functionality does not exist for brew cask. Instead, you have to use:

brew cask install --force $nameofprogram

As a programmer, of course doing all of this manually seems like too much trouble. I spent some time on Friday writing a simple shell script that would execute the brew force install on each app that had been cask installed. This is not an ideal solution for a number of reasons, but it is functional.
That script looks like so:

#!/bin/bash
for program in `brew cask list`

do
  echo $program
  brew cask install --force "$program"
done

One of the other problems with installing apps in this way is that the update creates a second app in your homebrew folder, which means that you get obnoxious dupes in your spotlight search. I started working on a script that would remove the older folder in the apporpriate directory if there were more than one. This is as far as I got in shell script:

#!/bin/bash
for program in `brew cask list`

do
  echo $program
  brew cask install --force "$program"
  for version in `ls -trh /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/$program`

  do
    echo $version
  done
done

Obviously this doesn't really do anything beyond printing the version of the Cask install. This was a far as I got because shell script is awful. Instead, I worked out how to make groovy, which I already write, interact with the command line, and wrote something that does what I wanted in Groovy.

def programList = "brew cask list".execute().text.split("\n")

programList.each { program ->
  println "$program"
  println "brew cask install --force $program".execute().text
  def versionList = "ls -trh /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/$program".execute().text.split("\n")
  if (versionList.size() > 1) {
    def removeFolder = { i ->
      println "Removing version: ${versionList[i]}"
      println "rm -rf /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/$program/${versionList[i]}".execute().text
    }
    0.upto(versionList.size() - 2, removeFolder)
  }
}

This works reasonably well for what I want to do, especially when the script is linked to a short alias that runs the script. Still needs work, but I am happy about it for now.

Cheers,

Michael

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