How to force reload preference plist for an app in OS X?

Question

My swift program periodically updates the com.google.Chrome.plist file stored in /Library/Preferences.

During the initial executions, it just needs a restart of Chrome browser for the policies to take effect. But now I need to restart the system to make the policies to take effect. How do I get it to update without restarting the Mac?

And also the Reload policies button in chrome://policy won't do the trick. (I wonder what's its purpose?)

And also, please explain the difference between placing the plist file in /Library/Preferences and in /Library/Managed Preferences

Or is there any command for OS X, like gpupdate /force (for windows) as they said here.

I also recently found that this problem persists for other apps too ( I tried editing the plist file of Safari from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist and it requires a system reboot to take effect )

I'm stuck here for long. A nudge in the possible direction would do too!

Thank you!

Answer 1

The reason is, from Mac OS Mavericks, apple started to cache plist files, which results in replacing a plist file manually has no effect until the cache is reloaded automatically. If you open the application which uses this plist file to early, it overwrites your copied file with the old/cached one.

To reload the preference file manually, use defaults read <filename>.plist to read the new plist values.

Source: nethack

Now, I just use a sh script to call the defaults after executing my program.