[launchd-dev] The "daemons must live for at least 60 seconds" factoid

[Kevin Van Vechten]

In general, launchd does not relaunch processes which exit successfully.

It would help if you shared the relevant portions of your launchd plist.

Kevin

On Aug 19, 2009, at 5:16 AM, Jonathan del Strother wrote:

> It's a commonly repeated piece of folklore that if your launchdaemon
> completes in under 60 seconds, launchd will assume it has crashed and
> will re-launch it.  I have a LaunchAgent with a 2 minute
> StartInterval, which exits quickly if there are no available jobs for
> it to work on.  launchd tends to run it once due to the StartInterval,
> then again 15 seconds later - presumably because it didn't live for at
> least 60 seconds.  Adding "sleep(60)" to the end of my LaunchAgent
> seems to prevent it from launching the 2nd time around.
>
> However, I can't find any actual documentation that mentions this,
> and I'm sure I've heard somewhere that it was a Tiger bug/feature
> only, due to be fixed in Leopard - this appears to not be the case.
> It seems an odd feature, too - why relaunch something that exited with
> a successful status code?
>
> Is there any official documentation of this behaviour?
>
> -Jonathan del Strother