On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Michael Wing
<marsfurrycreat...@gmail.com>wrote:
> This may be the wrong place to ask this question, but it doesn't hurt to
> ask. I'd like to remotely start a screensaver that is password protected.
> Essentially, locking the system from afar.
> For instance, I can run this from a terminal on the system, and it works
> great:
> open -a /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework//Versions/A/Resources/Scre enSaverEngine.app
> However, if you run that from a remote SSH session, it ends up with the screen locked and unresponsive until you've killed the ScreenSaverEngine process.
> I just figured out how to do this. I created a plist entry that calls a
script every 5 seconds with launchd. That script starts the screensaver if
the file exists. The rest of the process involves me creating that flag
file with a remote SSH command.
Here's the plist:
<?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>Launch_Screensaver</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/tmp/sswatch</string>
</array>
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>5</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
Here's the script:
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -e "/tmp/ssstart" ]; then exit; fi
/bin/rm -f /tmp/ssstart
set ssrunning=`/bin/ps -ax | /usr/bin/grep ScreenSaverEngine |
/usr/bin/grep -v grep`
if [ "${ssrunning}" != "" ]; then exit; fi
open -F -a
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework//Versions/A/Resources/Scre enSaverEngine.app
