alt Hacker News> The script parses macOS’s system_profiler SPUSBHostDataType2 command, which produces a dense, hard-to-scan raw output
I couldn’t find source (the link in the article points to a GitHub repo of a user’s home directory. I hope for them it doesn’t contain secrets), but on my system, system_profiler -json produces json output. From that text, it doesn’t seem they used that.
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internally uses the same root command btw. in fact this recently changed for Tahoe (as the article mentions).
started out as a shell script but switched to a go binary (which is what is linked).
Correct. But you didn't see that the source was one level up in the directory tree from the untrustworthy binary blob?
* https://github.com/kaushikgopal/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/usb...
Presumably there is a sensible way to do this in go by calling an API and getting the original machine-readable data rather than shelling out to run an entire sub-process for a command-line command and parsing its human-readable (even JSON) output. Especially as it turns out that the command-line command itself runs another command-line command in its turn. StackExchange hints at looking to see what API the reporter tool under /System/Library/SystemProfiler actually queries.
Last bash source: https://github.com/kaushikgopal/dotfiles/blob/7f37454a887989...
First Go source: https://github.com/kaushikgopal/dotfiles/blob/f0f158398b5e4d...