[launchd-dev] LaunchAgents folder permissions

[Peter Alshuth]

Hi,

We had some customers reporting that our product is not working. A  
further investigation turned out that the file permissions of the / 
Library/LaunchAgents folder was not the default one any more. Some  
other product that installed something into it had changed the  
permissions and preventing launchd to iterate the items in this folder  
to launch it.

What is the best way to prevent this situation? Should my installer  
always check for the correct default permissions of /Library/ 
LaunchAgents & /Library/LaunchDaemons and change it back in case they  
were altered (what about compatibility issues with future OS X  
versions)?

There is still a chance that the user runs the installer of the  
'faulty' product at a later time and I have the same situation.

Even if my daemon would check the permission bits of the /Library/ 
LaunchAgents folder at startup-time (bad solution), it might be  
already too late because launchd starts pre-handling the LaunchAgents  
folder maybe even before the LaunchDaemons-items get executed.

Most customers are not familiar with the Terminal and typing some  
commands in order to fix this situation.

Unfortunately, the 'Repair Disk Permissions' of the Disk Utility  
doesn't seem to change the permissions bit back to its original values  
of this folder.

Thanks for any help,
Peter