App fails to launch for "weird reason: 13"

General
1

I have a Cocoa app I sent to a friend to try out on his Mac. When he double-clicks it, it won’t launch. It works fine on my Mac running OSX 10.9 (same as his).

Here’s what his console.log has to say about it:

Jul 30 14:12:36 PC101524 com.apple.launchd.peruser.89443671[158] (com.mckernon.Lightwright.92784[2210]): Job failed to exec(3) for weird reason: 13
Jul 30 14:12:36 PC101524.local Finder[177]: 8837325: Attempting to SIGCONT to pid #2210 failed, with errno=#3, or the process failed to actually start
Jul 30 14:12:36 PC101524.local loginwindow[43]: ERROR | -[Application setAppContext:] | Unable to get PID for context [0,462961]
Jul 30 14:12:36 PC101524.local Dock[175]: no information back from LS about running process LSASN:{hi=0x0;lo=0x71071}
Jul 30 14:12:37 PC101524.local Finder[177]: 8837325: Attempting to SIGCONT to pid #2210 failed, with errno=#3, or the process failed to actually start
Jul 30 14:13:07 — last message repeated 98 times —

Does anybody have any idea what a “weird reason: 13” means? Or what else might be happening? The app is built in Xojo 2014 R2.

Thanks!

  • John
2

What Mac OS is your friend running? Is it an Intel Mac? Did you sign your app to make GateKeeper play nice?

3

I found mention of it by searching the Internet :

One user fixed the problem by setting the permissions with chmod +x
Another mentioned https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4543912?start=0&tstart=0 where it is recommended to change archive utility. Could it be that your friend used something else than OS X to extract the app ? Or have you used any other utility besides right click “Compress folder” ?

4

Hmmm… I didn’t .zip the app, I put it in a Dropbox folder and shared it with him. I normally use App Wrapper to sign my apps, maybe I forgot to do it this time. I make sure it’s signed and will suggest he using chmod +x.

Keep your fingers crossed…:wink:

Thanks!

5

I’d zip them before putting them on dropbox
Almost certainly symlinks & any other bundle internals like that get messed up

6

Yes; I’ve had mixed results, at best, when trying to put uncompressed apps in my dropbox for others to use.

7

I just did a new build, signed it, .zip’d it, and it’s back in Dropbox. Hopefully my friend will be happily running it tomorrow morning.

Thanks for all your help!

  • John
8

DropBox most certainly did not keep the permissions when you copied over.

Mac compress is the best way to make sure of the integrity of an app across different systems. And DropBox is not on a Mac, so some “little details” like permissions are probably unknown to it. AFAIK Mac and Linux are the only ones to use permissions in the chmod sense; Windows does not seem to.

9

Signing and zipping did the trick, thanks!