On Dec 2, 2017, at 12:13, Shane Stanley <sstanley@...> wrote:

What I want to do is to script the creation of that event, and for that I need to specify the filepath property of the "open file alert" but *that* doesn't work.

As noted elsewhere, you can't do that since macOS 10.9. The filepath property is a vestige of bygone carefree days.

On Dec 7, 2017, at 17:50, 2551phil <2551phil@...> wrote:

On 7 Dec 2017, at 15:41, Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@...> wrote:

My understanding was that if Program Arguments is there, Program is ignored.

Well, the docs say this:

  Program <string>

     This key maps to the first argument of execv(3) and indicates the abso-

     lute path to the executable for the job. If this key is missing, then the

     first element of the array of strings provided to the ProgramArguments

     will be used instead. This key is required in the absence of the

     ProgramArguments key.

     ProgramArguments <array of strings>

     This key maps to the second argument of execvp(3) and specifies the argu-

     ment vector to be passed to the job when a process is spawned. This key

     is required in the absence of the Program key.  IMPORTANT: Many people

     are confused by this key. Please read execvp(3) very carefully!

You may be right (I’d assume so, if your test scripts work), but I don’t see a statement that quite supports what you said. But at best it’s redundant to use Program when you’ve specified Program Args and correctly specified the path to the executable in the first item of the array. At worst, I dunno…

Best

Phil

@sqwarq

On Dec 7, 2017, at 18:43, 2551phil <2551phil@...> wrote:

If it’s correct, it means what you think it means, but I’d still argue that unless that's officially documented, it is better not to rely on it.

Best

Phil

@sqwarq

On 7 Dec 2017, at 16:37, Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@...> wrote:

On Dec 7, 2017, at 17:34, 2551phil <2551phil@...> wrote:

Good work! I shall retweet that.

BTW, you don’t need to specify both Program and Program Arguments in your plist. If you leave out the Program key (and the osascript string that follows it), launchd will take the first item in the Program Arguments array as the Program (which you correctly have as the path to osascript).

The way you’re doing it, you’re technically passing /usr/bin/osascript as the first argument to /usr/bin/osascript, which you don’t really want to do.

Ok, I found where I got this idea. It's in the http://www.launchd.info link:

When you provide both keys, the value of Program is the executable to be started. The first string in ProgramArguments will show up as argv[0] in the executable. If this makes no sense to you, just think that launchd will ignore it.

And indeed, it did not make sense to me :) But since it works I thought my comments in the code were not entirely wrong.

JC