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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T18:53:32+00:00

I am receiving this error when trying to execute applescript from my java application.

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I am receiving this error when trying to execute applescript from my java application. The code is as follows:

String script = "tell application \"Terminal\" to do shell script \"/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\\ Extras/user.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend\" ";
ScriptEngineManager mgr = new ScriptEngineManager();
ScriptEngine engine = mgr.getEngineByName("AppleScript");
engine.eval(script);

I get the following error:

Exception in thread "main" javax.script.ScriptException: Expected “"” but found unknown token.
    at apple.applescript.AppleScriptEngine.evalScript(Native Method)
    at apple.applescript.AppleScriptEngine.eval(AppleScriptEngine.java:342)
    at apple.applescript.AppleScriptEngine.eval(AppleScriptEngine.java:313)
    at myTestApp.Main.main(Main.java:25)

Thanks for your consideration.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A guess based on experience… Maybe the escaped space in the pathname is your show stopper.

    Try to call a script from a location where the path has no spaces or try to ‘double-escape’ the escaped space, like so:

    "tell application \"Terminal\" to do shell script \"/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\\\\ Extras/user.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend\" "

    A common reason for strange errors are those whitespaces in pathnames. So it was my first guess, that this causes trouble in your script. Then I remembered that sometimes we have to ‘escape escaped backslashes’. This article doesn’t explain, why it solved exactly your problem, but it shows how many backslashes may be needed…

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