Software Update hangs…where can I see a log as to what its doing?

Question

For the last 2 weeks Software Update on my Snow Leopard box seems to hang at "Installing 1 item...Writing files...". Where can I look to see if it is making progress or just hung up? It has been trying to finish today's Software Update for over 2 hours now. It feels like it is hung but I would like to be sure before I kill it.

Answer 1

So it looks like the Console application is the only way to "view the logs", so to speak. I launched it from the Finder under "Applications/Utilities". It is rather sparse, but it does have information regarding the update.

I am having more success watching the progress of Software Update by executing it from the command line of a terminal. This I launched as

sudo softwareupdate -i -a -v

I still don't expect it to complete, but am hopeful that I can get a better clue as to why it is failing. Currently there are 4 packages called out in /Library/Updates, one of which is likely the source of my problems:

bobk-mbp:~ bobk$ find /Library/Updates/
/Library/Updates/
/Library/Updates//.DS_Store
/Library/Updates//index.plist
/Library/Updates//ProductMetadata.plist
/Library/Updates//zzzz041-3450
/Library/Updates//zzzz041-3450/041-3450.English.dist
/Library/Updates//zzzz041-3450/CoreFPDelta.pkg
/Library/Updates//zzzz041-3450/iTunesAccessDelta.pkg
/Library/Updates//zzzz041-3450/iTunesXPatch.pkg

Finally, it looks like you can actually tail the install log as

tail -F /var/logs/install.log

So I now know how to watch the thing, but why isn't it completing?