Superfluous OSX Volumes

General
1

I’m a simple guy (which means maybe I shouldn’t be in the computer biz) so when I traverse the Volumes array in Xojo I want to see REAL Volumes, like ‘Macintosh HD’ or ‘My External Drive’ or just simply the names of the Volumes that I see in the Finder.

What I DON’T want to see is all this symlink geeky stuff like ‘home’ or ‘etc’ or ‘net’. I see this stuff more often in Lion/ML/Mav than I do in 10.6 or earlier. And of course, my system is pretty simple - I got clients that do all sorts of funky stuff.

I had for awhile eliminated viewing volumes called ‘home’ or ‘etc’ or ‘net’ but then I got a client who actually had a real drive he called HOME.

My question is: how can you identify these superfluous Volumes and just get the ones that show up in the Finder - the ones that truly represent file-containing storage areas?

2

These “superfluous Volumes” need of course to be included because they are not superfluous for others. It is your job to filter them out. Look at the properties of the FolderItem class - since Volume(index) returns a FolderItem. For example DesktopFolder will be Nil unless it is the main volume. And so on…

And for folders have a look at SpecialFolder.

3

Thanks Eli, but going further, I looked at the stock FolderItem values and MBS’s, and I couldn’t find anything really worthwhile.

Does anyone know what to look at - what property(s) - that would distinguish a Finder-showing-worthy Volume?

4

I just get a listing of /Volumes on OSX to get a list of actual disk volumes. This will show all mounted disks and DMG files.

5

Volumes:
FolderItem.Locked is False for the main volume and regular mounted disks. It is True example for the volume MobileBackups, home and net.

Folders:

Dim arr() As FolderItem Dim volume As FolderItem = Volume(0) For i As Integer = 1 To volume.Count Dim firstChar As String = volume.Item(i).Name.Left(1) If Asc(firstChar) >= Asc("A") And Asc(firstChar) <= Asc("Z") Then arr.Append(volume.Item(i)) End Next
This will show all folders on the main volume which start with an uppercase letter (these folders are the ones visible for the user on OS X).

6

Interesting? So a Volume starting with anything other than a uppercase A-Z will not show in the OSX Finder?

And I thought Mac’s could do everything. =)

7

There is nothing that says an OSX volume must start or not start with an UpperCase Letter to be displayed.
you can have legit disk volumes with lowercase names… it is just a matter of convention that the OSX underlying volumes are named that way… but nothing stops an end user from doing the same

I happen to have an external drive volume named “home” [lowercase]

  For i As Integer = 0 To volumeCount-1
    if volume(i)<>nil then 
// Select where GROUP is not "wheel"
     msgbox str(i)+":"+volume(i).name+"/"+volume(i).Group+"/"+str(volume(i).locked)
    end if
  Next

Plus it is bad practice to name a variable the same as an existing function… especially since VOLUME and VOLUMECOUNT are pre-defined already

the system disks all belong to group “wheel” and will be locked… other disks will probably belong to group “staff”, and MAY not be locked (the user can lock the volumes too)

8

And certainly for any NTFS volumes (excepted if a NTFS reader is active in the OS X boot volume).

On a default install (on OS X 10.8.5 for example), NTFS volumes appears Locked.