List all the Intel-ready apps on your Mac

Jan 18, '06 05:40:00AM

Contributed by: fds

With the first Intel-based Macs released, you might be interested to know how many of your installed applications are already ready to run natively on the new systems without translation. The GUI way of doing that is opening a Get Info window on each and every app and looking at the Kind entry (look for Universal), but that is clearly very time consuming.

Instead, here's a simple Terminal command to get a list of all of your Intel-ready apps in one go:

2>/dev/null find /Applications -type f -perm +111 -exec lipo \
-info '{}' ';' | grep -w i386
One important thing to note: some applications might contain more than a single executable, having various helper programs. That does not necessarily mean that the main application itself is also Universal. Toast 7, for example, comes with a Universal binary helper utility, ToastImageMounter, while the main application itself is PowerPC-only.

What you are looking for are lines for the main application, eg. (line break added for narrower display):
Architectures in the fat file:
  /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes are: ppc i386 
On my iMac G5 running 10.4.4, I found that only Photo Booth, iTunes 6.0.2, QuickTime 7.0.4 and various Java settings utilities are already Universal, alongside with a handful of free apps: Fire, Service Scrubber and SubEthaEdit. Of course, the new Intel-based systems ship with an OS where all the basic apps are Intel native as well.

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