2015-10-08 17:30 GMT+02:00 Lamb, John (NIH/NCI) [C] <john.lamb2@nih.gov>:

All,

Hello,

1. In OS X 10.11;

I was wondering if there was a way to gracefully refresh com.apple.ctkpcscd (child process of securityd, seems to be a framework launched by /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ctkd.plist) to detect new drivers in /usr/local/libexec/SmartCardServices/drivers to avoid needing a restart.

A launchctl unload/load doesn’t do the trick, and (i know this is dumb, but i was exploring the behavior) a killall securityd doesn’t either.

What I do is to "kill" the com.apple.ifdreader process.

I used to send the KILL (-9) signal but a HUP signal works as well and gives a change to the process to exit cleanly.

Note that any connection to the reader(s) will be lost.

The com.apple.ifdreader process is automatically restarted when a new USB reader is connected.

Maybe there is an official (cleaner) way to do that but I do not know it.

2. Is there an equivalent mechanism in OS X 10.7->10.10?

10.10 is the same as 10.11 on this point.

On 10.x with x < 10 you can kill the pcscd process.

If there isn’t a public way to do this, we’ll deal with the restart happily.

You should not have to reboot a Unix system :-)

Bye

Dr. Ludovic Rousseau