I'm making a custom installer in which I want to provide the option of a normal desktop install to the hard drive and a zero-footprint install to a removable USB drive (no registry entries, prefs stored in the app folder, etc.).

To help make this simple for the user I'd like to present a list of available USB drives if they choose that option, so they can pick the target for the install.

Phil Davis was kind enough to share some pointers in his libUsbDrive library (see <http://pdslabs.net/usb/index.html>), which has me exploring the use of shell calls on OS X to system_profiler, e.g.:

   get shell("system_profiler -xml SPUSBDataType")

While the info returned there contains a lot of very useful stuff, the one thing I'm not able to find is the name of the volume as it appears to the user on the desktop.

Well, sometimes, that is.

It seems that if I've named the drive in the Finder, the Volumes section of the data returned from that shell call is filled in, and includes the apparent name of the volume.

But drives which haven't been given a name on a Mac system appear on the desktop as "Untitled", and although the data from the system_profiler shows it as a removable drive there is no Volumes section included and hence no way to know the name of the drive as it appears to the user.

When there is is a Volumes section the _name key there shows the name as it appears in the Finder, but drives that have not explicitly been given a name appear as "Untitled" or "Untitled 1", etc., in the Finder and the corresponding _name key from system_profiler is something different (for example my card reader device has a _name value of "Generic USB2.0 card " in system_profiler, but on the desktop it appears as "Untitled 1").

Do any of you know a way I can use shell or AppleScript to obtain the apparent name of a removable drive when system_profiler fails to return it?

Extra bonus points: what shell calls would I use to get this info on Linux? I think I have the Windows side of things down, but I'll need to work out the Linux side soon.

TIA -

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World
 Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
 Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
 revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
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