The immediate problem is that your .plist file isn't correctly formatted -- the contents of <string>...</string>
should be encoded with HTML entities, i.e. &
needs to be encoded as &
(note: you can check the format of .plist files with plutil -lint filename.plist
). But there are some other changes that need to be made...
Starting programs with launchd is rather different than starting them from a shell. The biggest difference is that from the shell, you want the program to go into the background and run independently of the shell, so you wrap it in nohup ... &
. With launchd, it's actually best for the program to stay in the "foreground" so launchd can keep an eye on it.
Also, the elements of ProgramArguments won't get parsed by a shell, so listing the command and its arguments with spaces between them doesn't work -- make each argument a separate element of the array.
Here's my stab at a synergy .plist. I haven't tested this, so it may need a little tweaking to work properly (see notes below):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>local.synergy</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/bin/synergys</string>
<string>-f</string>
<string>--config</string>
<string>/Users/USER/bin/conf/synergy.conf</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
<key>Nice</key>
<integer>10</integer>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<false/>
<key>AbandonProcessGroup</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
The last two keys above deal with how launchd should react if/when the synergys program exits. By default, it kills any surviving subprocesses and launches a new instance; these two keys supress both parts, which may or may not be what you want. Also, one thing this doesn't do that your version with nohup
does is redirect stdin and stdout to nohup.out (in case the terminal goes away); instead IIRC launchd logs things that get sent to them. If synergys is in the habbit of sending output, you might want to add something like this to the .plist:
<key>StandardOutPath</key>
<string>/dev/null</string>
<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/dev/null</string>
Also, as mankoff said, you should put this in ~/Library/LaunchAgents so it'll be autoloaded every time you log in. Oh, and you should probably add a local.
prefix to the filename (as I did with the label) to conform to the reverse-DNS naming convention.
Best Answer
Since your per-user launch agent does actually execute, albeit later than scheduled, it is highly likely that your system may be asleep at the scheduled time. I would recommend reading through the man page by running the following command from a terminal session:
Regarding the
StartInterval
option specifically, the man page has this to say:If you are working remotely, or not physically present at the scheduled time — which is not clear from your question — a good starting point would be to confirm that the system has not entered sleep mode prior to the scheduled time of your launch agent.