Help creating Aliases

If your Macs are bound to a directory system such as Active Directory then the $HOME variable should do the same thing instead of parsing results from dscl.

echo $HOME

$USER is already a special variable and will give you the user's name instead of having to get it via logname.

echo $USER

But you're asking about AppleScript... Again, if your Macs are bound to a directory system such as Active Directory then this should get you their network home folder in AppleScript:

path to home folder

The syntax to create an alias would be something like:

tell application "Finder"
    make alias to (path to home folder) at desktop
end tell

You can substitute "desktop" with a path to a location. Be sure you use colons instead of forward slashes as your path separators: "Macintosh HD:Users:auser:Desktop"

If they're not bound then you can still use dscl to get the user's network home folder but it will need some cleanup to convert slashes to colons and remove the "/Volume" part of the path. Post back if you need help with that.

Thanks for that Moose but that is making an alias of /Users/$user, not the network home :-(

OK, makes sense. That would work if you were using network home directories. Thought I'd try the easy thing first.

So, let's get the home folder path using dscl and awk within AppleScript:

set networkHomePath to do shell script "dscl "/Active Directory/TALKINGMOOSE/All Domains" -read /Users/wsmith SMBHome | awk '{print $2}'"

In our environment we're using DFS paths and Mac OS X 10.7.4, which supports DFS paths. My result is: \\talkingmoose.netSTPBuisiness01users$wsmith

Unlike creating a symlink AppleScript must have access to the object before it can create an alias. That means you have to mount the network folder. We'll have to take the path we're provided and convert the backslashes to forward slashes:

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "\\" -- this is an escaped backslash
set tempList to text items of networkHomePath
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
set SMBPath to tempList as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""

My result is: //talkingmoose.net/STP/Buisiness01/users$/wsmith

We have to prefix "smb:" to the path:

set SMBPath to "smb:" & SMBPath as string

My result is: smb://talkingmoose.net/STP/Buisiness01/users$/wsmith

The AppleScript command to mount the volume is

set userHome to mount volume SMBPath

At this point, depending on your Mac OS and your network home folder setup, you may get a top level folder appearing on your desktop or you may actually get the "wsmith" folder mounted. I'm making an assumption that your Macs are bound to Active Directory and that Kerberos is working for single sign-on.

Let's see how far you get with this and we'll go from there.