Terminal command to see the Startup Disk in macOS

If you want to see what the current Startup Disk is on your macOS installation, you can certainly go to System Preferences > Startup Disk.

But if you want to use the terminal instead of the GUI, this command will return the current Startup Disk:

bless –getBoot

If a Startup Disk is set, you’ll see something like this:

/dev/disk0s2

If no Startup Disk is set, you’ll see this error message instead:

Can’t access “efi-boot-device” NVRAM variable

or this one:

Could not interpret boot device as either network or disk
Can’t interpet EFI boot device

And, yes, there’s a typo in the error message (as of macOS 10.12.6, anyway). That should say Can’t interpret instead of Can’t interpet.

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