MacOS – Prevent a program (steam) to start for a time period

applicationsmacos

Out of habit I play games, but it's something that I'd like to change without deleting all of the games I have. So I was wondering if it's possible to prevent steam from starting in the same way there are apps that block you from accessing the internet.

Best Answer

How do you launch Steam? I think you could create some kind of scheduled task in Automator/cron that either moves Steam.app to another location (preventing your Dock icon from working) or, if you use Spotlight, somehow breaking the application bundle.

For example, you could disable with:

mkdir ~/NoSteam/
mv /Applications/Steam.app/Contents ~/NoSteam/

And re-enable with:

mv ~/NoSteam/Contents/ /Applications/Steam.app

Kludgy but effective.