How to reset mac PRAM through the command line in Lion/Mountain Lion?

Question

I'm trying to write a script to automate a PRAM reset and I've seen a lot of old guides that tell me to use the following command to reset the Mac's PRAM via the terminal:

nvram boot-args="-p -r"

But this command doesn't seem to work anymore, at least not on any of the computers I've tried it on. I'm trying to find a more up-to-date list of available boot-args and I was able to find this question about boot-args strings but there doesn't seem to be anything in there or any of the links about resetting the pram.

Any ideas?

Solution

Mountain Lion does not have this functionality, but Mavericks does!

Resetting the PRAM is now as simple as running the following command as root:

nvram -c

According to the man page for the nvram command (in Mavericks):

-c     Delete all of the firmware variables.

I should note that this also works all the way up to and including Sierra.

Comments

[slhck]

The user wants to write a script to automate this from a shell in a running system, not doing it by rebooting.