Hrm.. I tried double quoting that and I swear it didn't work. I started using the subshell while trying to figure it out and maybe that's where I started bumping in more issues.

Thanks for the tips.

Could you (or someone) explain why your technique is preferable to the technique mentioned above, where you simply tell iTunes to use a different Library at startup, and it continues to use that Library until you tell it to use a different one??

What benefits are there in using this rather complicated hint (at least for those of us with minimal CLI skills!)?

I think it is rather obvious, once you have set it up you don't have to do anything other than plug in the external drive. Not that pressing a button at the application start-up is hard, but still...

What is suggested is an automated approach, harder to set up, no work later. It just follows the idea that any manual labor that is repeated might be worth to automate. If you do it once or twice, it is probably faster/cheaper to do it by hand.

If one only could script the computer into plugging the external drive by itself :-)

Don't be afraid to learn to use the terminal. Even with minimal knowledge of CLI you will see that the potential for your Mac increases dramatically.