Local User LaunchAgent via SSH: Operation not permitted

launchdssh

I have a launch agent on a remote machine which runs Yosemite. The LaunchAgent is saved to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ and I am the owner:

$ ls -l ~/Library/LaunchAgents
-rw-r--r--@ 1 me  staff  803 Jan 13 15:13 org.my.custom.plist
$ ls -l@ ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.my.custom.plist
-rw-r--r--@ 1 me  staff  803 Jan 13 15:13 /Users/me/Library/LaunchAgents/org.my.custom.plist
    com.apple.TextEncoding   15

When logging in via SSH (as that particular user), attempting to load the file produces the following exchange:

$ launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.my.custom.plist
/Users/me/Library/LaunchAgents/org.my.custom.plist: Operation not permitted

Why is the operation not permitted when I'm the owner? It works fine under Sierra.

Best Answer

This appears to be an issue with the launchctl 'session' that is used for the agent and that is incorrectly inferred by the start command. The new version of launchctl has some new commands for loading agents that allow you to specify this, see here.

The following seems to work via SSH:

launchctl bootstrap gui/<UID> /Users/me/Library/LaunchAgents/org.my.custom.plist

You can then (re)start the service using

launchctl kickstart -k gui/<UID>/org.my.custom

Here <UID> is the user's UID which can be found with id -u <username>.

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How to write to Notification Center from a launchd command

You can send to Notification Centre using Applescript (osascript )in you shell script.

There is a very good thread here that explains the various ways of either running only Applescript as a shell script or being able to mix applescript in with bash, for example.

I created a shell script with:

#!/bin/bash
theDate=`date '+DATE: %m/%d/%y TIME:%H:%M:%S'`

osascript -e "display notification \"$theDate\" with title \"test 1\" subtitle \" sub 1\""

I then created a LaunchDaemon in the same way you have and loaded it without sudo.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>notifTest</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/Users/userName/Documents/notify.sh</string>
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Every 90 seconds I get a notification:

enter image description here

The notification icon you will notice is the Script Editors one. Which means the Notification is controlled by the Script Editors Notification settings in Notification Centre

Best Answer

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