Question

Currently I am developing a small application that I wanna to remove the airport settings.

Firstly, I use shell command networksetup to delete the preferred networks, and then delete the recorded-password in keychain by AppleScript. But I found that the airports’ passwords recorded in both system.keychain and login.keychain. I write the AppleScript such as:

tell application "Keychain Scripting"
set keychainName to "Login.keychain" -- "system.keychain"
set gkeyCount to count generic key of keychain keychainName

repeat with keyIndex from 1 to gkeyCount
    log keyIndex
    if (account of generic key keyIndex of keychain keychainName is "ABCD") then
        delete generic key keyIndex of keychain keychainName
        log "find the key"
    end if
end repeat

end tell

For keychain “login.keychain”, it’s no problem, but for keychain “System.keychain”, it failed with a popup show me “Keychain Scripting got an error: File not open with write permission.”

Any idea?

Answer 1

Edit: This doesn’t work. Ah well, it was just a guess anyway. I’m leaving the answer up for posterity.

---

My guess is that the problem is that the system keychain is locked. I can’t really test this, since I don’t want to delete things from my keychain, but I did confirm that my system keychain defaults to being locked, and this seems like the sort of thing which would cause the error you see. Thus, I’d do something like this:

tell application "Keychain Scripting"
    set keychainName to "Login.keychain" -- "system.keychain"
    set doRelock to false
    set kc to keychain keychainName
    if locked of kc then
        unlock kc
        set doRelock to true
    end if
    try
        set gkeyCount to count generic key of kc

        repeat with keyIndex from 1 to gkeyCount
            log keyIndex
            if (account of generic key keyIndex of kc is "ABCD") then
                delete generic key keyIndex of keychain keychainName
                log "find the key"
            end if
        end repeat
        if doRelock then
            lock kc
            set doRelock to false
        end if
    on error
        if doRelock then lock kc
    end try
end tell

The idea is to first unlocked the keychain if you need to, and then make sure you relock it when you’re done. Let me know if this does or doesn’t work—like I said, I had nothing I wanted to test this on.