Primary Unit

A quick and hopefully final update on my short AppleScript to restart from Mac OS X into your Bootcamp partition.

The last time we looked at this I had cobbled together some AppleScript, grep and awk for a fairly reliable script, but it required some fiddling if you were still using Leopard (10.5).

I’ve revised the script again, this time relying on the $NF variable in awk to extract the last field. That makes using diskutil list easy, and so I now recommend the following for all users, including those on Leopard or Tiger:

set deviceID to (do shell script "diskutil list ¬
  | awk '/YourBootcampPartition/ {print $NF}'")
do shell script "bless -device /dev/" & deviceID & ¬
  " -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" ¬
  with administrator privileges
tell application "Finder" to restart

Here’s the shell part to get the identifier on its own:

diskutil list | awk '/YourBootcampPartition/ {print $NF}'

To be clear, the name of the partition must go between the two slashes.

Aside from making it a purely shell script, which causes problems with prompting for the user’s credentials, I can’t see how this can get any simpler and so I fully expect this to be the last time I write about it.

I’ve uploaded the script as a Gist, if you’d like to star or fork it.