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August 2015

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2 discussions

Remove "disabled" services; Migrate from "old" launchd
by Jerry Krinock 27 Aug '15

27 Aug '15

Ever since 10.5, my apps have used long-running launchd agents to detect filesystem changes, and these in turn schedule one-shot agents to perform tasks. They do this by writing and removing plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, and by running launchctl with subcommands ‘load’ and ‘unload’. I just discovered that running this command: launchctl print-disabled gui/`id -u` shows hundreds of such services, probably every one which my app has created for the past year or more. Apparently, my agents are not being completely removed, only “disabled”. How do I remove them? I tried ‘unbootstrap’, but got: Command is not yet implemented. * * * More broadly, is there an article which explains the recent changes in launchd, so that I can properly update my apps? The current launchctl man page is incomprehensible to me until I get to the LEGACY SUBCOMMANDS section. No more “agents", it seems; everything is a “service”.

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Re: [launchd-dev] Remove "disabled" services; Migrate from "old" launchd
by Jerry Krinock 24 Aug '15

24 Aug '15

> That's strange. In the past, launchd would forget about just about everything except the installed .plists after a restart. But I suspect the new launchd is now configured by a persistent database. Hmmm. I have not tried a restart. > Next, I'd try the new print-cache command and see if your service names are in there. They are not. > If they are, you might try the new uncache <service-name> command to see if you can get launchd to forgettaboutit. Tried it anyhow. Result: Command is not yet implemented. After all that, I tried a restart, launchctl uncache and launchctl remove again. Result: No change. I also counted the number of disabled services my app has using "grep -c". Result: 3060. That’s three thousand sixty. Eeek. What are these doing? How can I remove them?

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