Re: Lion crashed by AppleScript
Re: Lion crashed by AppleScript
- Subject: Re: Lion crashed by AppleScript
- From: Matt Deatherage <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 04:49:18 -0500
On Jul 22, 2011, at 4:07 AM, Emmanuel LEVY <email@hidden> wrote:
> I'm sure those who think it's dangerous are right, maybe it's specific to Lion, but could someone enlighten me?
Property List files typically aren't directly created by applications; they're created by the system through use of preference APIs. Applications provide the key-value data to the preferences API and Mac OS X stores the values in disk, in memory, or in whatever fashion it likes. Although this is usually in .plist files, I don't know that it's guaranteed to be so. (The "defaults" command-line tool goes through the preferences APIs to read and write these values.)
If you use a tool that goes through the preferences API, like "defaults," the system at least has a shot at figuring out that you're changing a running program's preferences. But you're not doing that; you're simply assuming that an application creates this .plist file (it doesn't, the system does), that it's only read once during startup (this is neither documented nor guaranteed), and that changing values via text-XML manipulation is supported (this may be true for an app that's not running, but no one can promise *anything* if you're changing the files that a running application uses while it's running).
In short, there's a whole lot of thinking that .plist files are magical text controls, and they're not. It's a storage system for live, active, API-managed preferences for a running application. The fact that they're usually stored in a human-readable format is not carte blanche to do whatever you want with them. I would not be surprised in the future if permissions were changed to keep one program out of another program's support files like this.
--Matt
Sent from my iPad
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