At Brooks we have a large number of macs on our network. As is customary in large environments, regular users do not have the ability to install software. This has a downside: users can’t receive the automatic software updates released by Apple. However, we discovered that software updates can be run from the command line without any user interaction (well, except for QuickTime which is broken and pops up a registration window — for this reason we exclude it in our script).
Anyhow, we have created a package that makes it easy for other OSX adminstrators to push out automatic software updates. It just creates the following file: /etc/periodic/daily/500.softwareupdates which will run software updates daily (at 3am usually). Download it here.