Jerry,

Apple is clearly trying to transition to a different architecture/philosophy for agents and daemons. But while they're getting their ducks lined up, the legacy launchctl commands still work (more or less) as advertised.

Have you tried 'launchctl remove <orphaned-service-identifier>' to make launchd forget?

James
Jerry Krinock
August 23, 2015 at 6:15 AM
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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