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This recent question was classified as a "duplicate" with existing answers. Two questions were cited as providing answers to the poster's question:

  1. This question from Jul 8, 2014

  2. This question from Sep 20, 2014

I don't mean to imply that a 5+-year-old question is no longer valid or relevant, but macos has gone through some changes since then. In particular, Apple seems to be less-focused on developers using scripting languages to interact with the system.

Question #1 above has 3 answers. Two of them are for libraries that appear to be no longer maintained (ControlPlane and Network-listener), and the third is for a commercial app (Sidekick) which got few votes, and wasn't selected as "the answer" by the OP.

Question #2 above has 1 answer that has gotten any votes in 5.5 years. In addition, the OP for the "duplicate" question made it clear in an edit that this question was different than the one he asked, and (IMHO) explained that lucidly and convincingly.

In closing, two comments:

  1. I would imagine that marking new questions as duplicates to questions posted years ago might occasionally discourage new, more relevant answers.

  2. It seems that in this case, the question is not actually the same.

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The general rule about putting on hold as duplicates is that we assume a question to be a duplicate if it asks basically the same question and the OP doesn’t explain how the answers to the original question miss to solve the problem. Without additional information this is also valid if the original question is related to a significantly older version of macOS or iOS.

I agree that there are valid reasons to give a specific topic a new chance by asking it within the context of a new OS version (as also discussed in How should we manage questions that have very different answers per version of macOS?). In such cases this can be easily accomplished by rewording the question accordingly. Even then it should be explained in the question whether the old methods have been tried and what the result was.

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  • These words are wise. Unless the duplicate question is edited to be very clear why the situation is fundamentally different, we should keep questions pointing to the canonical / main place to find answers relating to the main problem. Just saying “this isn’t a duplicate” isn’t enough - it generally shows clearly that a more fundamental edit is still needed.
    – bmike Mod
    Apr 14 '19 at 21:57

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