Taming Launchd
January 1st, 2007 | Published in Apple Dev Tech, Tools I Use, Unix
Developers, and some power users who are reading this have probably heard of launchd. It’s Apple’s ‘mama process,’ responsible for launching other processes at startup, login, at regular intervals, or on demand. If you open the Activity Monitor application, and view ‘All Processes, Hierarchically,’ you’ll see that there are only two top-level processes: kernel_task, and launchd. The kernel sits there and does its thing, while launchd spawns all the other processes that make up your Macintosh computing experience.
Some good insight into this relative newcomer to Mac OS X as a way or launching and running services of various kinds in the background, some good notes on the things that don’t work quite as expected (bugs) and some ways it is used now. Also some links to two of the editors for launchd files.
(Via Red Sweater Blog.)
