Trying to figure out why a launchd user agent won't run a bash script.

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Level 1

14 points

Trying to figure out why a launchd user agent won't run a bash script.

I'm trying to write a bash script that creates a couple of other shell scripts and loads them into launchd as user agents.

I'm stuck. Here's the current script: https://github.com/sethgoldin/davinci-resolve-postgresql-workflow-tools/blob/mac os-unified-tools/davinci-resolve-postgresql-workflow-tools-optimize-agent-macos/ macOS/automate-workflow.sh

Running the shell scripts inside

/backup

and

/optimize

manually works fine, but launchd just doesn't run them for some reason. Furthermore,

launchctl list

is showing the

backup

agent with an exit code of 0, but the

optimize

agent with an exit code of 127.

My hunch is that something is amiss down in the heredocs that create the launchd user agents, on lines 65-82 and 84-101.

Can any launchd gurus help me out?

I'm on macOS 10.12.6.

Posted on Mar 21, 2018 2:20 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Seth Goldin Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 21, 2018 3:43 PM in response to Seth Goldin

Figured it out. The heredoc for the

launchd

was using

$HOME

which expands to

/Users/username

. It turns out that

launchd

actually gets tripped up with that very first

. That seems like insane design, but I'm not a programmer. The fix is to use

Users/$USER

instead.

I hope this helps someone who stumbles across this at some point!

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Answer 2

etresoft

Level 9

50,758 points

Mar 22, 2018 8:40 AM in response to Seth Goldin

Hello Seth,

I suggest you try again with $HOME. Using "Users/$USER" is not correct. There is no guarantee that "Users/$USER" is a user's home directory. I'm not sure what was going on with the $HOME version, but I can assure you there is no problem with an absolute path. It sounds like you should be using the "Program" key instead of "ProgramArguments" since your executable doesn't have any arguments.

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