The (Annoying) Way To Get the Current MacOS Appearance Scheme From the Command Line

Ok, here’s something bizarre.

I’m trying to get the current MacOS appearance scheme — either light or dark mode — from the terminal. The way to do this is by running this command (source):

defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle

If MacOS is in dark mode, this will print Dark. But if MacOS is in light mode, the command will print… an error:

2022-10-04 09:15:18.058 defaults[35844:466643] 
The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleInterfaceStyle) does not exist

Running defaults read -g confirms what the error message says: the AppleInterfaceStyle key is not set when MacOS is in light mode.

Why was this chosen as the way to do things? Now I need to capture and parse stderr just confirm that the reason an error occurred was because MacOS is in light mode; as oppose to some other, possibly legitimate, reason.

A tad annoying I must say.