Ejecting disks from the Finder

As some of you may know, I've been a pretty hard core keyboard command guy for a pretty long time.

I just discovered a pretty handy trick that I thought I'd share.

I have a few external hard drives that have multiple partitions on them. It's not unusual for me to only want one or two of those partitions mounted at any given time, and the fastest way to unmount a partition is to selcet it in the Finder and hit command-E (for "Eject").

In the past, doing this would bring up a dialog asking you if you a) wanted to eject just that partition, b) wanted to eject all of the partitions, or c) wanted to cancel. You'd have to click one of the buttons, and off it would go.

Today, I was monkeying around in Lion, and found that if you select a partition on a multi-partitioned disk in the Finder and hit command-option-E, it would eject all of the partitions without the pesky dialog.

Additionally, I found that control-command-E would eject just the partition you had selected (again, no dialog).

I confirmed my suspicions, and found that these options actually do appear in the Finder's File menu when you pop the menu open and then hold down either the option and/or control keys (this is a handy way to discover other neat hiding keyboard commands).

Then as a lark, I decided to check out the Finder on my machine running Mac OS X 10.6.8. And how bout that - it's in there, too! I'm not sure if that's been in there since 10.6.0, but I'm pretty darn sure it wasn't there in 10.5, when that dialog was originally introduced (I don't have a 10.5 machine handy to confirm).

Anyway.

Share and enjoy.

Happy ejecting!