A couple of commands can substantially reduce update time

Jul 21, 2017 09:32 GMT  ·  By

Just like it happens on Windows 10, updating macOS is often a pretty painful experience, mostly because it takes way too long to download and install updates from the App Store.

But as it turns out, the whole process can be performed substantially faster if it’s performed from the command line tool, with users on reddit discovering that the typical software update commands can be further tweaked for extra options.

What’s probably the most important is that should you turn to the softwareupdate utility in the Terminal, you are allowed to continue using the device while updates download and install, with only a few minutes of downtime caused by the reboot when the update is complete.

Available commands

Specifically, you can launch the Terminal app and type the following commands, first to check for updates and the second to install them if any are available:

softwareupdate -l
softwareupdate -i -a
As 9to5mac notes, these commands can be further tweaked with additional parameters to obtain an even more seamless process. For example, you can turn to the following command to execute both commands one after another: sudo softwareupdate -ia;sudo reboot Another user comes up with a different command combination which he says triggers the reboot only if some updates are found and installed. This way, if something goes wrong, the reboot won’t be triggered and you are allowed to inspect the errors in the Terminal window: sudo softwareupdate -ia && sudo reboot In case you’re wondering how fast the process can complete should you turn to the command line utility, users on reddit claim it takes approximately 10 minutes to install macOS 12.6, as compared to nearly 30 minutes in the case of the App Store version.

And, what’s probably even more important, the downtime was reduced to no less than 2 minutes when the device performed the reboot to complete the update.