How to find out Mac OS X version from Terminal?

"You have a few options:

sw_vers -productVersion

system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType

Either will do what you need, and will have an output format that's parseable (if that's what you're after)."

"If all you care about is the major version (10.10, 10.9), you can do

MAJOR_MAC_VERSION=$(sw_vers -productVersion | awk -F '.' '{print $1 ""."" $2}')

I use this in a couple of scripts that have to do different things if run on 10.8.x, 10.9.x and now 10.10."