Back up OS X app icons

-March 22, 2015 -

OS X application icons are valuable assets, and it's interesting to see how they evolve over time. This is especially the case when we upgraded to OS X 10.10 Yosemite, when Apple and many design-aware third party developers overhauled (mainly flattened) their icons.

However, we lose all the old icons when we do a major OS upgrade. Technically they still live in Time Machine backups, but those are a pain to pull out. Therefore, I wrote a script just now to back up app icons of all applications living in /Applications (including those symlinked to /Applications, e.g., apps installed through brew cask) and its level-one subdirectories, and /System/Library/CoreServices (for Finder.app and such). Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
-function app_version
-{
-    # $1 is the path to the app
-    /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "print CFBundleShortVersionString" "$1"/Contents/Info.plist 2>/dev/null || date +%Y%m%d
-}
-
-function app_icon_path
-{
-    # $1 is the path to the app
-    filename=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "print CFBundleIconFile" "$1"/Contents/Info.plist 2>/dev/null)
-    [[ -n ${filename} ]] || return
-    filename=$(basename "${filename}" .icns)
-    echo "$1/Contents/Resources/${filename}.icns"
-}
-
-function process_app
-{
-    # $1 is the path to the app
-    name=$(basename "$1" .app | tr -d ' ')
-    path=$(realpath -e "$1") || { echo "${RED}error: broken link '${path}'${RESET}" >&2; return 1; }
-    version=$(app_version "${path}")
-    icon_path=$(app_icon_path "${path}")
-    [[ -n ${icon_path} ]] || { echo "${YELLOW}warning: '$1' has no app icon${RESET}"; return 1; }
-    [[ -f ${icon_path} ]] || { echo "${RED}error: '${icon_path}' does not exist${RESET}" >&2; return 1; }
-    cp "${icon_path}" "${name}-${version}.icns"
-    echo "${name}-${version}.icns"
-}
-
-find /Applications -maxdepth 2 -name '*.app' | while read app; do process_app "${app}"; done
-find /System/Library/CoreServices -maxdepth 1 -name '*.app' | while read app; do process_app "${app}"; done

The script is also available as a gist.