This is definitely a part of Mojave’s new security framework. In terminal try
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"' -e 'set _b to bounds of window of desktop' -e 'end tell'
and you may receive:
36:42: execution error: Not authorized to send Apple events to Finder. (-1743)
What is supposed to happen on the first execution is the Finder opens a dialog box informing you that terminal is requesting permission to send events to the Finder. If you allow it, then terminal will get added to the Automation page in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Automation:
There’s two issues that I see at the moment:
- the implementation of requesting permission for the scripting action appears to be bugged; I’ve run other scripts that request permission to send events to Safari and the Finder doesn’t prompt for permission, it just returns an error.
- streamlined automation requires some type of mechanism to have the permissions granted a priori; an example would be utilizing AppleScript with Ansible and being unable to preload grants
Others have written up more extensive information about this:
- https://www.felix-schwarz.org/blog/2018/06/apple-event-sandboxing-in-macos-mojave
- https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/106949
Hopefully this gets worked out before Mojave ships as it seriously impacts automation capabilities on macOS.