I’m currently using Sequoia 15.7.4 and running into an issue with “System Events” in Script Debugger.
According to the error message, Script Debugger — along with any scripts executed through it — sometimes doesn’t have permission to access “System Events.” The strange part is that this issue is inconsistent: sometimes everything works fine, other times it suddenly fails.
Has anyone else experienced something similar?
I’ve already tried resetting permissions in macOS System Settings, restarting the machine, and running OnyX for cleanup, but none of these steps have resolved the issue. The behavior still appears random.
Could this be related to some newer macOS security feature that gets triggered intermittently?
Thank you so much!
I’d had this problem for a few months and had posted about it on this forum, but I hadn’t found a solution.
The simple “Launch” command seems to work perfectly!
Thank you so much!
Yes, but since then I am sad to have to pour water into the wine: I recently had an issue with System Events erroring out on me at the regular 120 seconds timeout, whatever I did or tried (so did other applications depending on System Events or so at least it seemed to me). The background is that I had an overload of my USB-tree due to too many power hungry external drives, so the USB service crashed and I lost keyboard and mouse access. The only way to get out of this was a hard reboot. This, I suppose was the source of my troubles.
I googled the issue, found nothing. Then I booted into single user mode and safe mode to reset caches and stuff, I reset the power manager of my iMac (which previously had helped so solved so many completely disparate issues), deleted preferences, whatever. Nothing helped.
The only thing I could think of was to completely reinstall Sonoma over Sonoma.
Since for quite a while I had considered moving on to Sequoia, I took this as the final kick into my butt to finally do it. So I installed OS 15.7.7 (which runs very smoothly).
Now the problem is gone (of course, I tend to think) but it is not really resolved. I still don’t know what I could have tried before the last resort of OS reinstall.
In the end, I guess, it might be best to avoid System Events whereever possible and use ASObjC or shell scripts or the like. Sadly, for UI-Scripting, System Events seems to be the only tool at hand.
Yes, it was working again, and then it stopped working.
I also just upgraded to Sequoia 15.7.7, but System events still doesn’t seem to be working properly.
Very strange.
I’m still looking for the solution
Just let me confirm: you upgraded, i. e. from Sonoma or lower to Sequoia, OR updated from a previous Sequoia to the most recent version? If it is the latter:
• Make sure you have a complete, working and above all current backup of your system.
• Get the 15.7.7 FULL system installer and completely reinstall Sequoia on top of Sequoia (same version).
Let us know if this works out.
And no, this is not a “solution”. You should not be forced to do a complete OS reinstall to fix System Events. But I don’t know anything better.
One more thing to try before doing a complete OS reinstall - perhaps…
Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > System Events
Set the switch to OFF. Click on the Minus button at the bottom and remove System Events completely.
Shut the machine down.
Start up the machine holding the shift key down. When the startup completes you will find a notification in Red at the top right of the screen saying something like Secure Startup or the like.
Reboot the system.
Then try to use System Events, again.
Frankly, I would hope that this helps, but I kind of doubt it.
Have you tried to reset the power manager for your system? I did and it didn’t help. Google “reset power manager” + your machine type to find out how it is correctly done for your specific model. The methods vary vastly from one machine type to an other. You have to do it correctly to make it work.
I guess you should try. I have done it quite a couple of times over many systems in the last decade or so and I’ve always had good experiences. To do this is officially supported by Apple (as opposed to downgrading the OS version).
One more thing to try: Create a new virgin admin account. Reboot and boot directly into this account. Try if System Events is usable. Didn’t try this myself, but it could be worthwhile to see if there is something rotten in your main user account which causes the trouble.
Yes, we should try it. Trying it on another account is a very good idea; I hadn’t thought of that.
Thanks, I’ll post an update here in a few days, once I’ve done it, if it works.
After upgrading from Sonoma to Sequoia System Events seemed to behave for quite a couple of weeks, but then, seemingly out of the blue, the issue returned: System Events timing out or flat out declining to respond in some way or other when called from AS or JXA scripts.
Following my own advice I logged into a virgin user account to test scripts - and they worked without a hitch. Then I logged into my main trouble-making account while holding the shift key down to prevent login apps from being loaded - and again, no issues. So something from my login items had to be causing trouble.
In hindsight it could have been easily identified: I had a text script running periodically every 4s from KeyboardMaestro (don’t do that!) to check for the existence of an error message from UserNotificationCenter and CoreServicesUIAgent via System Events. Although KM’s help explicitely warns about executing periodic scripts in second-intervals, the script itself had worked flawlessly, without any CPU impact and without interfering with script executions etc. (an ugly solution, still, I am ready to admit)
I think the problem really came to the forefront when some other utilities also accessed System Events, e. g. SupaSidebar, which I had installed for testing, which regularly seems to poll Firefox’s GUI for lack of scriptability. This kind of utilities, in hindsight, had regular phases of high and unaccounted-for background CPU usage on my Mac, while at times responding sluggishly, incorrectly or not at all, most likely because these processes where competing for System Events’ ressources. Now that I disabled the KM macro and restarted the machine (the latter was absolutely necessary! - disabling the macro and quitting the KM engine did not suffice) my Mac behaves a lot better. Especially scripting System Events now works without issue.
There are several reports on various sites about System Events scripts suddenly no longer working and I bet that a good deal of them may be related to running a couple of “useful” utilities or periodic scripts overloading demand on System Events behind the scenes. This was the case here. Not a permission issue.
