Stuck with daemon calling bash script on macos; any ideas?

Question

I am new to scripts and daemons and, after toying for a while, find myself stuck.

Here is the situation: on macos, I have a program called "maza" which updates my hosts file using online blocklists. I want to run this program, say, once a week to keep up with changes in blocklists. After trying my luck with cronjobs (which didn't work), I am now trying with a daemon. So I have:

• One file called com.mazaupdate.plist located in /Library/LaunchDaemons
• One script called scriptmaza.sh located in /etc (since this is where the hosts file is)

My plist says the following (basically it seeks to launch the script - at this point every 60 seconds, for testing purposes).

<?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>com.mazaupdate</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/etc/scriptmaza.sh</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartInterval</key> 
        <integer>60</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

And my script says the following (it just stops maza, which is easier to test than "update" because there are currently no online updates to be made to the hosts file).

#!/bin/sh
sudo maza stop

Once the testing is over,the plist will be amended to launch the script every week only, and the script will be updated to read "maza update".

With my two files in place, I do:

sudo chown root /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mazaupdate.plist 
sudo chgrp wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mazaupdate.plist

and

sudo launchctl load com.mazaupdate.plist 

However, when I test the status of maza after a few minutes, it always says "enabled", meaning the stop command is not properly used. Of course, if I just use "sudo maza stop" in the terminal, maza properly stops and the status becomes "disabled", which ought to be the case if the script worked.

That's about all I have. Any idea? Thanks! Ken

EDIT:

Following comments by @pmdj below, here is where we stand.

After a chmod +x on scriptmaza.sh, permissions are: -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 ken wheel 80 17 Feb 12:22 /etc/scriptmaza.sh

The revised scriptmaza.sh is now:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/maza stop
date >> /Users/Ken/Downloads/file.dat

After loading the daemon for a little while, file.dat does get created and edited every minute with the proper date, meaning the daemon does launch the script.

The console shows the daemon being loaded and unloaded properly, and the scriptmaza log a number of lines saying "tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified"

Meanwhile, the status of maza remains "enabled".

EDIT2: maza author says "No, there is no flag because it is not necessary. I can confirm that it runs as a daemon because that's how it works on my computer. There is nothing in the script that you can't run line by line from a terminal. If you want to know what is happening, a first step would be to open it and run each line. Good luck!" Does this help?

EDIT3: removed the 'tput' elements for colours. The daemon still successfully launches mazascript, which successfully adds the date to the specially-created file.dat. However, maza is not actually stopped, as it should in the script (which, when it works, will be replaced with 'update'). The log now gives a new error, saying "ERROR. You must install gsed if you are using OSX". This error does not occur when launching maza manually, and gsed is already installed ("brew install gnu-sed" gives "gnu-sed 4.8 is already installed and up-to-date. To re-install.....". An alias for Gsed is found in "/usr/local/bin". The relevant part of maza (testing gsed) is the following:

custom-sed() {
    if [[ $THIS_OS = *$NAME_OSX* ]]; then
        # Check if OSX and install GSED
        if [ -x "$(command -v gsed)" ]; then
            gsed "$@"
        else
            echo "${COLOR_RED}ERROR. You must install gsed if you are using OSX${COLOR_RESET}"
            exit 1
        fi
    else
        # Linux
        sed "$@"
    fi
}
export -f custom-sed

EDIT4: here are the relevant parts; first the variables, then the update/start functions.

# VARIABLES
NAME_OSX="Darwin"
THIS_OS=$(uname -mrs)
PROGNAME=$(basename $0)
[[ -z "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}" ]] && CONFIG=$HOME/.maza/ || CONFIG=$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/maza
HOST_FILE=(/etc/hosts)
COLOR_RED=""
COLOR_GREEN=""
COLOR_RESET=""
LIST="list"
LIST_DNSMASQ="dnsmasq.conf"
START_TAG="## MAZA - List ad blocking"
PROJECT="### https://github.com/tanrax/maza-ad-blocking"
AUTHOR="### Created by Andros Fenollosa (https://programadorwebvalencia.com/)"
END_TAG="## END MAZA"
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

update() {
    # Make conf folder
    rm -f $CONFIG$LIST
    rm -f $CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ
    mkdir -p $CONFIG
    # Download DNS list
    curl -L -s "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts" -o "$CONFIG$LIST"
    # Clear list
    ## Remove comments
    # custom-sed -i.bak '/^#/ d' "$CONFIG$LIST"
    # Make dnsmasq format
    ## 127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net to address=/doubleclick.net/127.0.0.1
    cp "$CONFIG$LIST" "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    custom-sed -i.bak 's/127.0.0.1 /address=\//g' "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    custom-sed -i.bak 's/$/\/127.0.0.1/g' "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    ## Add start tag DNS list in first line
    custom-sed -i.bak "1i\\$AUTHOR" "$CONFIG$LIST"
    custom-sed -i.bak "1i\\$PROJECT" "$CONFIG$LIST"
    custom-sed -i.bak "1i\\$START_TAG" "$CONFIG$LIST"
    ## Add end tag DNS list in first line
    echo $END_TAG >> "$CONFIG/$LIST"
    ## Add start tag DNS dnsmasq in first line
    custom-sed -i.bak "1i\\$AUTHOR" "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    custom-sed -i.bak "1i\\$PROJECT" "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    custom-sed -i.bak "1i\\$START_TAG" "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    ## Add end tag DNS DNSMASQ in first line
    echo $END_TAG >> "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ"
    # Remove temp file
    rm "$CONFIG$LIST.bak"
    rm "$CONFIG$LIST_DNSMASQ.bak"
    # Notify user
    echo "${COLOR_GREEN}List updated!${COLOR_RESET}"
}

start() {
    update
    # Add List to host file
    cat "$CONFIG/$LIST" >> "$HOST_FILE"
    # Notify user
    echo "${COLOR_GREEN}ENABLED!${COLOR_RESET}"
}

Answer 1

This started out as a comment but got out of hand.

Here's an incomplete list of what I'd check and try if I was troubleshooting this:

1. What are the permissions on the script? Is it executable? (what does ls -l /etc/scriptmaza.sh say?)
2. Is the maza executable in the root user's default $PATH?
3. Are you seeing anything relevant in the system log?
4. Have you tried logging any output and errors from your script? Add something like this to your launchd plist:

    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/scriptmaza.log</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/scriptmaza.log</string>

5. Have you tried adding any other side effects to your script you can use as evidence for checking whether or not your script is running at all, for example an echo command or date (If not logging stdout/stderr, you'll need to explicitly write to a file using >> /var/log/scriptmaza.log or so)

(FWIW, /etc/ isn't a great spot for executable scripts, but it shouldn't prevent things from working. You also don't need sudo in the script as it'll run as root anyway, and if it didn't, there's no interactive console for entering a password anyway.)