How to mount and name a volume if it's not already mounted with a startup script

Question

I'm trying to do something I thought would be simple, but after researching it I feel like I'm half way towards shaving a yak, so I'm asking for advice. I want to create a script that lets me and my colleagues do normal spolight searches on a shared drive, which from research seems to not be easy and is best solved with a script that:

• Runs on startup (it sounds like the simplest way to do this is to make shell scripts launch on startup using Automator)
• Checks if a volume of a certain name is mounted (a directory on an smb shared drive on an active directory Windows-based shared company drive)
• If it's not, mounts it to that specific name
• Then, index it in spotlight, using its volume name. I think I've got this part covered: mdutil /Volumes/name -i on, apparently

The bolded parts are the parts I'm having trouble with.

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Particular problems I'm having:

• I've found an AppleScript way to mount a drive if it's not already mounted - check name of every disk then mount volume "path://to/volume" - but it doesn't allow me to specify the name, and I'm cautious about how consistent the Mac will auto-name a path on a non-Mac shared drive. I want to set the volume name so I can refer to it when telling Spotlight which volume to index, which seems to be impossible in AppleScript?
• I've found a shell script way to mount a drive to a specific volume, but I read (can't find the source now, am looking for it) that the volume has to already exist, which confuses me (do I need to create an empty volume? I don't quite understand what an empty volume would be); and I can't see how to check that it hasn't already auto-mounted.

My level of knowledge of Mac volumes etc is quite low, so I'm aware I may have misunderstood any of the above.

Answer 1

OS X follows these steps when mounting a drive: It creates a raw device in /dev/ (for local disks only), it creates a folder in /Volumes/, then it mounts the drive to that folder it just created. That folder creation step is probably what you read. The shell script you linked is missing the following command:

mkdir /Volumes/somenetworkdir

Then the command you linked will work, with the proper parameters

mount -t smbfs -o username=RemoteUser //REMOTEHOST/directory /Volumes/somenetworkdir

Answer 2

set mountedVolumes to do shell script "ls /Volumes/"

if (mountedVolumes contains "thisDriveName") is false then

        mount volume "afp://thisUsername:thisPassword@thisIPorHostname/thisDriveName"

end if

Answer 3

You can check if a volume is mounted by checking the output of the mountcommand:

mount | grep '/Volumes/SomeVolumeName'

And you can mount it with open smb://.... So your script could look something like this

#!/bin/bash

server=my_server
share=SomeShare
user=my_username
pass=y_password

# ...

mount | grep -q "/Volumes/$share " || open smb://$user:$pass@$server/$share

# ...

The open smb://... command will mount it under the name of the share.