MacOS – Shell script to boot OSX in recovery mode and execute another shellscript

bootmacosrecoveryscript

I'm working at a University and we are restoring our Macs using Apples ars which works great. The process is to manually go to the computer – reboot it in recovery mode and then run the ars command to sync the image from the server.

Is it possible to do this via shell script? I imagine the steps to be roughly:

  1. Set a OSX flag that reboots into the recovery mode.
  2. Execute a shell script that runs the asr (Maybe via LaunchDaemon?)
  3. Reset the flag to boot from the normal boot volume
  4. Reboot

Unfortunately I did not find information how to manually reboot into recovery mode or launch an automatic script from the recovery partition.

Do you have any idea how this could work?

Thanks for your help!

Best Answer

To set the flag to boot in safe mode is the easiest: sudo nvram boot-args="-x"

The I guess we have to do something with;

rc.boot figures out the type of boot (Multi-User, Safe, CD-ROM, Network etc.). In case of a network boot (the sysctl variable kern.netboot will be set to 1 in which case), it runs /etc/rc.netboot with a start argument.

and this;

/etc/rc finally launches /sbin/SystemStarter to handle startup items from locations such as /System/Library/StartupItems and /Library/StartupItems. A StartupItem is a program, usually a shell script, whose name matches the folder name. The folder contains a property list file containing key-value pairs such as Description, Provides, Requires, OrderPreference, start/stop messages etc. You can run SystemStarter -n -D as root to have the program print debugging and dependency information (without actually running anything).

ref: http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_startup.html

Related Question