Dae’s blog » Programming

AppleScript to mount/unmount a drive

Dae — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:50:52 +0000

On my Mac Pro I have two internal hard drives I rarely use. Some times they “sleep” and while doing so, every file opening dialog, search in Spotlight or search in Dictionary might wake them up and that takes some time. I could, of course, disable sleeping in power settings, but then the drives would be unreasonably wasting power all the time, so I decided to write an AppleScript to mount or unmount a drive depending on it’s state.

I’d like to emphasize: this script is meant to unmount an entire drive rather than just a volume. It takes a volume as an identifier of the needed drive. This is mostly useful for Mac Pros.

I will make a proper release of the script some time, now you can have a half-baked source code. The script requires Growl to be installed in the system. Tested only on Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”. Please use at your own risk!

Change myVolumeLabel variable to the label of any volume on the drive you want to (un)mount.

set myVolumeLabel to "Storage HD"

tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
	set the allNotificationsList to {"Disk mounted", "Disk unmounted"}

	register as application "Disk Mounter" all notifications allNotificationsList default notifications allNotificationsList icon of application "Disk Utility.app"
end tell

tell application "Finder"
	set diskDev to do shell script "diskutil list | grep \"" & myVolumeLabel & "\" | grep -o 'disk[1-9]*' "
	if not (disk myVolumeLabel exists) then
		do shell script "diskutil mountDisk " & diskDev
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Disk mounted" title "Volume mounted" description "Disk “" & diskDev & "” with volume “" & myVolumeLabel & "” has been successfully mounted." application name "Disk Mounter" icon of application "Disk Utility.app"
	else
		do shell script "diskutil unmountDisk " & diskDev
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Disk unmounted" title "Disk unmounted" description "Disk “" & diskDev & "” with volume “" & myVolumeLabel & "” has been successfully unmounted." application name "Disk Mounter" icon of application "Disk Utility.app"
	end if
end tell

Last updated: 30.05.10

Update: please note that unmounting an internal HDD screws up some links, for instance, if you had shared folders — they will not be shared after re-mounting the drive. Use the script only with the drives that you never/link use at all in Mac OS — in my case, this applies to the Bootcamp drive.

Permission error of AppleScript in iTunes

Dae — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:19:16 +0000

I was getting a permission error (code -54) when trying to set an id3 tag of a track using AppleScript. The solution was to add a delay between each operation: delay 1 Note that the track will remain “locked” until … Continue reading →

Launch character palette using AppleScript in Snow Leopard

Dae — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:47:03 +0000

tell application "CharacterPalette" to activate

There is an issue though: the new character palette doesn’t get “bound” to any of the applications, therefore double-clicking a symbol doesn’t paste it automatically to the text field. You’d have to drag-and-drop.

I’m posting this because most results from Google were telling me to launch a “.component”, and that “.component” doesn’t exist on my Snow Leopard system.

Restrict page access to authorized MODx managers only

Dae — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:50:57 +0000

A while ago I needed to create a private zone with documentation, accessible only by the MODx managers. In order to restrict access I wrote a simple snippet, which you can now use as well.

Snippet name: ManagersOnly
Description: Restrict access to managers only.

if (!isset($_SESSION['mgrValidated']))
{
	header('Location: '.$modx->makeUrl($modx->config['unauthorized_page']));
	exit;
}
else
{
	$modx->setPlaceholder('manager_name', $_SESSION['mgrShortname']);
}

Usage: add [[ManagersOnly]] in the beginning of the page or in a template. In case the visitor is authorized as a manager, the snippet will also return the placeholder [+manager_name+] (MODx manager’s “short name”), so you can greet them. Please note that the placeholder will not work correctly with cached pages.

Dae’s blog » Programming

AppleScript to mount/unmount a drive

Permission error of AppleScript in iTunes

Launch character palette using AppleScript in Snow Leopard

Restrict page access to authorized MODx managers only

Add an to a using Mootools Dae — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:42:46 +0000 var newoption = new Option("option html", "option value"); try { $('myselect').add(newoption, null); } catch (err) { $('myselect').add(newoption); } To select the newly created option: newoption.setProperty('selected', 'selected');

Add an