Anyone know how I can print the list of applications from the System Profiler?

deniro,

Might this work for you in OS X 10.6.3?

System Profiler . . . (System Information in OS X 10.9.4) . . .-> Software

Click on Applications

Command + P

In my case, rather than printing 37 pages, I can select PDF -> Save as PDF.

In 10.6.8, the best I could do was extract 80 something pages of apps from a 329 page pdf...the only one I could produce, and the resultant list, which was in alpha order by category only, was totally user-unfriendly.

Good idea, but not quite what I wanted, though I haven't thoroughly examined my 414 page pdf.

It's odd, isn't it, that I can't just copy and paste the list of applications with their version numbers &c. in the Profiler.

deniro,

I tried a few searches at the App Store, but no results seemed to address your question.

I cannot think of any other workable way to print or save the System Information you want.

Trying to compile a series of screenshots in a word processing file . . . since a copy and paste of the list does not work. . . seems quite tedious for the amount of data you are outputting into a .pdf.

Hard to believe there isn't a program that lists my applications, version numbers, etc. that the Profiler gives. I think I could do that back on OS 9. And OS 8…

In Terminal:

system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType

If you want to programmatically extract data from that, add a -xml option to get the output in XML format, then use XML tools of your choice to extract the data. (Trying to extract data from a complex non-XML file using regular expressions is iffy at best.)

If you want to save the data for later perusal, save it as a .spx file (in XML format). Then use System Profiler itself to view the file pretty-formatted:

system_profiler -xml SPApplicationsDataType > ~/Desktop/apps.spx

If you want to see what has changed between different dates, use diff or equivalent to compare such files, saved on those dates, to see what's changed.