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I have a process that runs as root in the background. When a certain even occurs, I have it pop up an NSAlert with an NSTextField on it so the user can provide some info. However, the user is unable to click on the TextField or type anything into it. I can drag the Alert box around and click on the buttons on the Alert just fine.

I'm guessing this is because my process is running as root and not the end user account that is logged into the machine. Is there a way to easily get around this without spawning a separate process as the user and piping back the info via Distributed Objects or the like?

Tagnal
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  • "I'm guessing this is because my process is running as root and not the end user account that is logged into the machine." Que!? It sounds like a bizarre statement to me. – El Tomato Aug 23 '17 at 00:18
  • How so? My process runs as root. It launches once the machine is turned on. It runs whether someone is logged into the machine or not. However, when someone is logged into the machine, there are times when I need to ask for input from the end user. So I am trying to pop up an NSAlert. – Tagnal Aug 23 '17 at 00:34

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The best thing to do is to have your UI stuff running as the current user, not only because of problems like this, but also because running a GUI app as root poses a large number of security risks, and in fact there have been a number of security vulnerabilities in the past which were caused by some AppKit-enabled process running as root.

With that said, XPC is the mechanism you want to use to communicate between the root tool and the GUI app, not Distributed Objects, which is quite antiquated and has a number of issues of its own.

Charles Srstka
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