OS X (Apple)

I'm not sure how to do it yet. I just need a script that I can run on multiple computers that will tell me what machines require updates and the number of updates. I considered doing something along the lines of:
<code>softwareupdate --list |wc -l </code>
but that does not seem to be fool proof since there are obviously lines of output regardless of whether there are updates or not. I just need to get back the number of patches missing from unpatched machines. We have our own SUS, so the only updates being pulled should already be approved.

Please help.

Thanks!

Actually this is exactly what I need, a script that will read the output of softwareupdate --list and count the asterisks and return with a number of how many there were. If there were no asterisks then it can skip that machine.

How about:

Code:

softwareupdate --list | egrep '^[[:space:]]*\*' | wc -l
# or
softwareupdate --list | awk 'BEGIN { num=0 }; /^[[:space:]]*\*/{ num+=1 }; END { print num }'