[launchd-dev] What does the "_dirty" key mean?

[Damien Sorresso]

Axel,

My speculation would be that some other component of the system is twiddling the enabled/disabled state of that job somewhat regularly. That causes the database to "dirty" itself. 

Anyway I wouldn't worry too much about this. It's just an implementation detail leaking and shouldn't actually cause you any problems. 

-damien 

> On Mar 12, 2016, at 03:27, Axel Luttgens <axel.luttgens at skynet.be> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Le 7 mars 2016 à 17:46, Damien Sorresso a écrit :
>> 
>> Hey Axel,
>> 
>> launchd periodically synchronizes the disabled dictionary to disk, and it will only actually do that if the "_dirty" key is set in that dictionary. Once written, the key is removed.
>> -damien
> 
> Hello Damien,
> 
> Thanks for having kindly provided these details.
> 
> I gave me some additional time to observe the "phenomenon" before replying.
> 
> It seems that since I’ve noticed that "_dirty" key in the output of "launchctl print-disabled", I’m stuck with it: it persists no matter how long I wait or how often I reboot.
> 
> I guess the disk store is the /var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/disabled.plist file?
> 
> If yes, this is the current output of "plutil -p" applied to that file:
> 
> {
> "com.apple.mtmfs" => 0
> "com.example.myservice" => 0
> "com.apple.ftpd" => 1
> "com.apple.mrt" => 0
> "com.apple.locate" => 0
> "com.apple.rpmuxd" => 0
> "com.openssh.sshd" => 0
> "com.apple.usbmuxd" => 0
> "org.ntp.ntpd" => 0
> }
> 
> while the output of "launchctl print-disabled system" currently is:
> 
> disabled services = {
>    "_dirty" => true
>    "com.openssh.sshd" => false
>    "com.example.myservice" => false
>    "com.apple.rpmuxd" => false
>    "com.apple.usbmuxd" => false
>    "com.apple.ftpd" => true
>    "com.apple.mrt" => false
>    "com.apple.mtmfs" => false
>    "com.apple.backupd-auto" => false
>    "com.apple.locate" => false
>    "org.ntp.ntpd" => false
> }
> 
> One could thus infer from the above that the dirty state stems from "com.apple.backupd-auto".
> 
> In which case this raises a subsidiary question: why would the enabled status of that backupd-auto service never be written to disk?
> 
> Sincerely,
> Axel
> 
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