Newbie Mac tip, and a bug complaint: My shiny new iMac fails to recognize when I've inserted a CD or DVD into the drive about 1 in every 10 times. When it fails, the hardware successfully slurps in the disc, but it does not spin up, appear on my desktop, or open or appear in iTunes (if it's a music CD).

If I had been using an Apple keyboard, I would have noticed that the eject key still works even though the Finder says it knows nothing of the disc. I could then re-insert the disc and most likely get a successful read. However, I was not using an Apple keyboard, so I had been logging out and logging back in (closing all of my apps in the process) to get the disc recognized correctly. This made me wonder, is there a way to eject the disc similar to the Apple keyboard eject key, but without the Apple keyboard? Maybe a command-line tool?

To eject a CD or DVD from the command line:

drutil eject

This works even in the lame broken case I describe above.

drutil can do all kinds of neat things, including dump data about and from the inserted disc, burn a disc image, and more. Type man drutil in a Terminal to see all it can do.