Comments on: Usable Keychain Scripting For Lion

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 12:28:15 +0000

Hi Vic – I don’t know what system you are running on. I just verified I can download and open the dmg on Mac OS X 10.7. I assume it still works on 10.6 as well but can’t guarantee other OS’s.

By: Vic Brown

Vic Brown — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 08:38:39 +0000

Hi, I’m glad this is here. I can’t believe Apple doesn’t allow us to export. Ugh.

Anyway, I downloaded this .dmg and can’t open it in Apple Script or open it like other .dmg files. What have I missed?

Thanks

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:16:39 +0000

Hi Morten – you may want to take a look at Apple’s command line “security” tool, I haven’t looked too closely but it offers a lot of similar functionality to what an AppleScript interface does, and may allow you to mass-update items.

By: Morten Scheel

Morten Scheel — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:32:29 +0000

Thanks for the answer Daniel.
I hope you will bite that bullet. And if you do, I’d be happy to pay for the product. Unless I’m mistaken there’s no easy way to bulk change a lot of passwords on Lion right now.
Thanks again for all your work.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:11:32 +0000

Hi Morten – unfortunately Usable Keychain Scripting doesn’t support writing to the keychains. I originally wrote the scripting addition as a workaround for Apple’s insanely slow Keychain Scripting, so it only made sense to address the reading. It also made me feel a little safer about sharing something that works with such sensitive data, that it would only do reading and no writing.

That said, with the omission of Keychain Scripting from Lion, it might make sense to bite the bullet and add writability to it.

Daniel

By: Morten Scheel

Morten Scheel — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:17:00 +0000

Hi Daniel,
I can’t seem to write a new password to a generic item in my login keychain.
I use “set password to _string” inside the generic item’s tell block. There are no errors but the password doesn’t change. Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you for writing this!
Morten

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:14:02 +0000

James, great to hear. I am glad it’s working out for you!

By: James Bailey

James Bailey — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:11:42 +0000

Daniel,

Your Usable Keychain Scripting app works very well and is almost direct replacement for the Leopard version. And it is many times faster. I’m quite pleased that my home-grown password system is working again.

Thank you very much.

James

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:45:09 +0000

So glad I found this. Am still using Snow Leopard but the old Usable Keychain Scripting would place an extra character onto my passwords about 50% of the time and I couldn’t figure out why. This version seems to have stopped the problem.

Thanks Daniel!

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:32:07 +0000

@Robert – It looks like Usable Keychain Scripting is using the full path name of the keychain as its name. This doesn’t seem like a great thing for it to do, but you can work around the problem by referring to the target keychain by its full path e.g.:

tell application “Usable Keychain Scripting”
set kcPath to (POSIX path of (path to home folder as string)) & “Library/Keychains/Open.keychain”
unlock keychain kcPath
end tell