Mac OS X: Refreshing service menus works in Terminal but not in post-install-script

Question

I have an OSX application providing a service menu to other applications. This works fine so far, the menu is activated and available after a user installed the app and logged out and back in. (see similiar post)

I know the log-out-and-back-in is obsolete when triggering the service menu agent (pbs) to scan for changed services by opening a terminal and running /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs (this also works without having the new application launched even once)

So I´d like to provide an installer (.pkg) which runs "pbs" as post-install script. Suprisingly, running "bps" as post-install only works if the application was launched before e.g.: #! /bin/sh

sleep 3
open /Applications/MyApp.app
sleep 3
/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs
exit 0

Unfortunately, (due to application specific reasons) I do not want to start my application directly from the installer. Does anyone know why the post-install-scrips behaves different than the Terminal?

Answer 1

Eventually, as a workarround, I am going to start my application hidden and stopping it again before running pbs. Still looking forward for a better solution.

Answer 2

Depending on the rights the Installer requires the post-install scripts maybe runs as root user. Try:

sleep 3
su -l "${USER}" -c "open /Applications/MyApp.app"
sleep 3
su -l "${USER}" -c "/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs"
exit 0