This article proposes a technic to programmatically lock the screen.
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The Keychain Access application has a preference to display a “Lock Screen” menu item in the menubar:
After enabling the checkbox Show keychain status in menu bar
, this menu will appear in the menubar:
This menu is located here:
/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/Resources/Keychain.menu
and it is fairly easy to find the method -[AppleKeychainExtra _lockScreenMenuHit:]
.
That’s this simple! The method -[AppleKeychainExtra _lockScreenMenuHit:]
simply calls the private method SACLockScreenImmediate
from the Login private framework. The Login framework takes care of all the hard work.
Now we can create a simple application to lock the screen. Here is the whole source code:
extern void SACLockScreenImmediate();
int main()
{
SACLockScreenImmediate();
return 0;
}
To compile it:
clang -F /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks -framework login -o LockScreen LockScreen.c
You can download the precompiled binary here: LockScreen.zip