application badges at your command line

Turns out one can:

lsappinfo info -app NetNewsWire -only StatusLabel

which produces something like:

"StatusLabel"={ "label"="6" }

One day I'll learn awk and feel ashamed of what I'm about to write below, but here's how to use grep to get just that count, if you must:

lsappinfo info -app NetNewsWire -only StatusLabel | grep -E '[0-9]+' -o

and we get only the digits in the output:

6

Hat tip to Alexander's answer to this question, which put me on the right track despite his reservations. Reading the convoluted code in the other answers, I have none at all.

You won't be surprised to know that the actual place where I wanted to read that badge wasn't the CLI but Emacs, to display it in my little notification centre hosted in the minibuffer. I've been putting together some utilities to run applescript and such, and at first I thought of using NetNewsWire's dictionary with something like:

tell application "NetNewsWire"
  set result to 0
  repeat with acc in accounts
     set theFeeds to allWebFeeds of acc
     repeat with f in theFeeds
       set theArticles to articles of f
       repeat with a in theArticles
         if (not (read of a)) then set result to (result + 1)
       end repeat
     end repeat
  end repeat
  return result
end tell

which works… if you're willing to wait the couple of minutes it takes to run! Reminded me of the old adage in systems programming stating that a result that comes in late is an incorrect result.