Blogaria

Well, I'm a keyboard type of guy and I hate clicking around. So all this of course can be scripted. It's all really very simple, but hey, maybe the below example will inspire someone to do their own scripting of repetitive tasks.

The script is appropriately called wow and it accepts arguments:

• wow start mounts the disk and starts the game (in the back ground);
• wow end kills the game if it's running and unmounts the disk;
• wow (without arguments) mounts the disk, starts the game, waits for it to finish, and unmounts the disk.

Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-b <bundle identifier>] [-a <application>] [filenames]
Help: Open opens files from a shell.
      By default, opens each file using the default application for that file.  
      If the file is in the form of a URL, the file will be opened as a URL.
Options: 
      -a                Opens with the specified application.
      -b                Opens with the specified application bundle identifier.
      -e                Opens with TextEdit.
      -t                Opens with default text editor.
      -f                Reads input from standard input and opens with TextEdit.
      -W, --wait-apps   Blocks until the used applications are closed (even if they were already running).
      -n, --new         Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running.
      -g, --background  Does not bring the application to the foreground.
      -h, --header      Searches header file locations for headers matching the given filenames, and opens them.

In this case, my script only uses open <diskimage> to mount an image, or uses open <application> to start an app, or it uses open -W <application> to start an app and wait for it to finish. Besides that, disktool is used to unmount a disk image. Well, here's the script. Hope it's somewhat useful to you. Mind that if you want to use this, you'll have to edit the configuration at the top of the script.

#!/bin/sh

# Another little proggle to make my life easier. This time a shell script
# that starts my favorite game, WOW. I have the game on a separate disk
# image. So when I want to play, I need to (a) mount the image, (b) start
# the game and play it, and (c) unmount the image as a cleanup. That's what
# this lil'script does.

# Configuration - edit at will. Specify the disk image, the mount point
# of the image, and the application (inside the image). You can find these
# out by locating your game image by hand, and by mounting it using the
# Finder. Then in /Volumes you'll see the mountpoint. The app is located
# somewhere inside the mountpoint.
image=/private/images/WOW.sparseimage
mountpt=/Volumes/WOW
app="$mountpt/World of Warcraft/World of Warcraft.app"
# End of configuration. The rest should need no tweaking.

# Mount the game image onto the mount point
function mountdisk() {
    if [ ! -d "$mountpt" ] ; then
        echo "Mounting $image"
        open -W "$image" || exit 1
        if [ ! -d "$mountpt" ] ; then
            echo "Failed to mount $image to $mountpt"
            exit 1
        fi
    fi
}

# Run the game app off a mounted image
function runwow() {
    echo "Starting $app"
    if [ ! -d "$app" ] ; then
        echo "Failed to locate $app"
        exit 1
    fi
    open "$1" "$app"
}

# Stop the game (kill the process)
function stopwow() {
    pid=`ps  ax | grep World | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
    if [ -z "$pid" ] ; then
        echo "Not running, nothing to stop"
    else
        echo "Stopping pid $pid"
        kill "$pid"
    fi
}

# Unmount the game image
function umountdisk() {
    disk=`disktool -l | grep "$mountpt" |
    awk '{print $3}' | awk -F\' '{print $2}'`
    if [ -z "$disk" ] ; then
        echo "No disk in use, not ejecting"
    else
        echo "Unmounting disk $disk"
        disktool -u "$disk" >/dev/null
    fi
}

# Main starts here, depending on the argument the above functions are
# called
if [ "$1" == "start" ] ; then
    mountdisk
    runwow
elif [ "$1" == "stop" ] ; then
    stopwow
    umountdisk
elif [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    mountdisk
    runwow -W
    umountdisk
else
    cat <<EOF

Usage: wow start : starts the game (as a background process)
   or: wow stop  : stops a previously started game and cleans up
   or: wow       : starts, wait for the game to stop, cleans up

Game image expected as : $image
Mount point            : $mountpt
Game application       : $app
   
EOF
fi