At 14:58 -0400 29/10/07, Jeremy Reichman wrote:
So now, with Leopard, LaunchAgents in /Library/LaunchAgents will run at login for each user, as the user [...], and without having to restart the computer between each user login session?
Yes. The only significant gotcha that I can think of relates to installing and upgrading. Except in the simple case (where you have one user logged in and your installer/upgrader is running in that user's context), you run into problems with the install/upgrade process. There's no built in way for you to tell all per-user launchd's on the system that a new property list has been installed (or that an old one has been upgraded). Thus, you can get into situations where one user is running version X of your agent and another is running version X+1. Or one user doesn't have the agent installed and another does. There's no really good way around this right now (although there are plenty of hackish ways). Just for the record, we're tracking this as <rdar://problem/5476420>.
as the user (by default)
The "(by default)" indicates some confusion about how agents work. An agent is always launched by a per-user launchd, and that per-user launchd is always running with its EUID and RUID set to that of the user on whose behalf it's working. Thus, there's no "by default" about it. An agent will always run as that user and there's no way around that (other than by doing something silly like making your agent setuid root). The UserName and GroupName properties in an agent's plist are ignored (as they were on 10.4.x). I've rolled all of this info into a new Technote 2083 "Daemons and Agents" that scheduled to be published in the next couple of weeks. Watch the skies! (actually, <http://developer.apple.com> :-) S+E -- Quinn "The Eskimo!" <http://www.apple.com/developer/> Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware