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I’m try to develop an app to lock my computer and log the password attempts and other such coolness. I’ve gotten it working except for one glaring issue: You can Command-Option-Esc to force quit it fairly easily. Is there anyway to bypass the force quit keys so my application will not quit?

Do you grab fullscreen etc? I think that would at least keep the force quit dialog from coming to the fore… If that isn’t satisfying enough, probably there’s a POSIX way to handle (i.e. ignore) the SIGINT or whatever it is you receive when the user force quits you.

Actually, I was able to figure it out. I used the CGCaptureAllDisplays() to get my app above everything else (there’s a great article on Cocoa Dev Central [http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/] for this topic). The problem isn’t that Force Quit window would come up, but the application would just quit itself instead. It was getting a SIGINT, but I’m not familiar enough with the POSIX functions anyway. So, I hunted around a bit and found the SetSystemUIMode() function in the Carbon framework. Here’s the article on ADC about it (which is also a very good article): http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2062.html

Actually, I do not think there is a POSIX way of doing this. If I am not mistaken, Force Quit sends a SIGKILL which cannot be caught using the signal() function. The manpage for signal says the following: Except for the SIGKILL and SIGSTOP signals, the signal() function allows for a signal to be caught, to be ignored, or to generate an interrupt. These signals are defined in the file

Martin Mroz

So the point is not to find a way to ignore, SIGKILL, it’s to prevent the user from issuing SIGKILL in the first place. Disabling the force quit dialog and such.

Long time lurker, first time poster, new to OS X, but long time Solaris, AIX, *BSD, and Linux admin/user. ** If ** OS X allows you do do this (via WindowServer, KernelEventAgent, or whatever) ** don’t **. What if a different program needs to be killed? And if done via WindowServer, or whatever mechanism is used to disable the Force Quit dialog, you’ve done nothing to prevent * kill -9 * .

Welcome! However, we’re not talking about normal situations. Click on the tech note link above (which solves the problem, btw), and consider kiosk applications.