Can I use scripts to automate Flash Player downloads?

Anything is possible; however, there's no supported path, and no guarantee that after automating the process, that things on our side would stay constant.

The resources that we're talking about were intended to make life easy for system administrators; however, they were the subject of really egregious abuse, which required us to limit access to only valid licensees.  When we left those links behind authentication but static, valid licensees posted the links publicly, again facilitating widespread abuse.  So, there's now some token validation that ties the download links back to the individual session, such that the downloads are only accessible after successful authentication.  It's that whole "this is why we can't have nice things" problem.

So, you could totally automate this with a little reverse engineering.  Your script will just need to log in, in order to scrape the token and construct the valid download request.  There are also some commercial services that handle patching in the enterprise that handle this transparently for their customers.  We're not affiliated or endorsing those services to my knowledge, so I'm not dropping names.  Again, those download links and/or token handling could all change at any time, so I'm not sure how much time you're saving, vs. taking the few minutes per month to just pull the resources down manually and put them in a local path for consumption by your distribution scripts.

The long-term plan *is* to provide some kind of API or other supported path for providing easy to automate, authenticated downloads; however, the distribution service itself is handled by another engineering group, and I'm not aware of what the estimated timeframe for that work will be.