CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macoskeyboardshiftlaunchd
Frank Weijers
Frank Weijers

Reputation: 71

Disable a Macbook's keyboard

In my search for a solution to disable the keyboard on my Macbook, I am currently struggling with Launchd.

Some background first: I spilled some water on my Macbook Pro 2010 model and since then some keys on the keyboard no longer work. I started using the Mac as a desktop with external keyboard, mouse and monitor and went great for a while. But then it got worse with the shift-key getting stuck (not the key itself but somewhere on the motherboard I guess). The shift forces the Mac to boot into Safe Mode. I got around this by pressing the Option key during boot. But now there's something new: some keys are triggered randomly so the computer gets unusable... I got around this problem using a no-password login, and by running this shell command: 

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTCKeyboard.kext/

I put this command in a script called disable-keyboard.sh. It works great! The internal keyboard is switched off, and the external keyboard works nice.

However, running this command is a real pain with the random triggered keys making it difficult to load a terminal. So I need to run this command at boot time. I got into Launchd:

I made a property list file:

more /Users/<username>/Library/LaunchAgents/DisableKeyboard.plist

<xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>DisableKeyboard</string>
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/Users/<username>/disable-keyboard.sh</string>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

And it seems to work:

launchctl load /Users/<username>/Library/LaunchAgents/DisableKeyboard.plist

returns

Users/<username>/Library/LaunchAgents/DisableKeyboard.plist: service already loaded

However: launchctl start DisableKeyboard gives this error message in 

system.log:


com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (DisableKeyboard[292]): Program specified by service is not a Mach-O executable file.

What is wrong?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2990

Answers (1)

Frank Weijers
Frank Weijers

Reputation: 71

The correct script at /Users/<username>/disable-keyboard.sh is:

#!/bin/bash
sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTCKeyboard.kext/

Upvotes: 4

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