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December 2013

5 participants
2 discussions

Can a launchd job get any access to its invoking plist?
by Norman Gray 23 Dec '13

23 Dec '13

Greetings. Can a launchd job get any access to its invoking plist? I'm writing a small application intended to be invoked, almost exclusively, from launchd. Its interface would be simpler if it could read the contents of the dictionary/plist which controls the job which launchd starts. It could potentially be invoked by more than one plist, and I'd like to preserve state keyed on (say) the job Label; it's invoked based on the WatchPaths element, and if it could see that key in the dictionary, then these paths wouldn't have to be duplicated in the ProgramArguments. I can work round the problem, but it feels like I'm missing a trick. Is there any way to get access to this dictionary; or (since I know about SMJobCopyDictionary) is there any way to get access to the job's Label? The existence of SMJobCopyDictionary indicates that this information is available in principle. I can't think of anything to google that gives me more than tutorials on using launchd. I've tried asking on StackOverflow <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20338636/>, but without success (the answer there is sensible, but somewhat tangential to the question). Thanks for any pointers. Best wishes, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

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Permissions/ownership for a per-user launch agent
by Mitchell J Laurren-Ring 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

I have a per-user agent that needs to be able to access the default printer for the current user. I'm having problems figuring out how to load it in the current user context from my installer postflight script. If I use "launchctl load" without sudo from Terminal, my agent loads correctly in the current user context and is able to access the user's default printer. If I load using sudo from Terminal, my agent cannot get the user's default printer. I have the following at the end of my postflight script: > chmod 755 /Library/Application\ Support/MyFolder/myd > chmod 644 /Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycompany.myd.plist > launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycompany.myd.plist The problem is that my postflight script is running as root which results in the launchctl command being executed as root, leading to the problem with not being able to access the default printer. There seem to be a few options I could use to fix this issue but most of them are poorly documented. Among these are: * The ProcessType, UserName and GroupName keys in the launchd.list * The -s sessiontype option for launchctl load * This note from the launchctl man page: "Note that per-user configuration files (LaunchAgents) must be owned by the user loading them." In case it helps, here is the plist that I install into /Library/LaunchAgents: <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>com.mycompany.myd</string> <key>Debug</key> <true/> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/Library/Application Support/MyFolder/myd</string> <string>launchd</string> </array> <key>Sockets</key> <dict> <key>PrimaryListeningSocket</key> <dict> <key>SockServiceName</key> <string>2687</string> <key>SockNodeName</key> <string>localhost</string> <key>SockFamily</key> <string>IPv4</string> </dict> </dict> </dict> /Mick

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