Finding the name of a USB volume

[Richard Gaskin]

Phil Davis wrote:
> Here is an simplified 'system_profiler' output approach. It returns one
> tab-delimited line of info per detachable USB storage device, with all
> the data items known to system_profiler for each device. NOTE: It
> expects system_profiler output to be in English.
>
>
> function macUsbDrives
>     -- get USB device info from system profiler
>     put shell("system_profiler -detailLevel full SPUSBDataType") into tData
>
>     -- convert data to one line per USB device
>     replace (colon & cr & cr) with numToChar(245) in tData -- device name
>     replace (cr & cr) with numtoChar(250) in tData
>     replace cr with tab in tData
>     replace numtoChar(245) with (colon & tab) in tData
>     replace numtoChar(250) with cr in tData
>
>     -- remove records for all but USB drives (English data only)
>     filter tData with "*Detachable Drive: Yes*"
>
>     -- remove space-padding from items in each line
>     set the itemDel to tab
>     repeat for each line tLine in tData
>        repeat for each item tItem in tLine
>           put word 1 to -1 of tItem & tab after tNewData
>        end repeat
>        put cr into last char of tNewData
>     end repeat
>     delete last char of tNewData
>
>     -- return the data
>     return tNewData
> end macUsbDrives

Very helpful Phil, and I appreciate your posting it, but unfortunately 
the issue I found with using system_profiler is that it doesn't report 
the volume name as it appears to the user on the desktop.

I had hoped there would be some reasonably simple way to get a list of 
mounted volumes that looks something like this:

<driveName>  <mountPoint>  <type>

...where <driveName> is the name as it appears in the Finder, 
<mountPoint> is either "/" or "Volumes/<drivename>", and <type> is 
either ATA, SCSI, CD/DVD, USB, etc.

With what I've learned in this thread it seems I may be able to use 
output from system_profiler checked against output from AppleScript 
calls to obtain such a list.

For the future, I see that Jeanne DeVoto had submitted an RQCC request 
for "the detailed volumes" which could do what I need if implemented as 
described there:
<http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=101>

In the meantime, it looks like I have some parsing to do and some 
homework to figure out the details of getting this info for Win Vista, 
Win 7, and Linux.  I'll post the result here once I get it working.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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