Vincent Gable

August 17, 2008

launchctl Gotcha

Filed under: Bug Bite, MacOSX, Programming, UNIX — Tags: , , — Vincent Gable @ 9:43 pm

On Mac OS X 10.5, the launchd you talk to as non-root user is not the same launchd you talk to when root. So
$ launchctl list
$ sudo launchctl list
print out different lists, and the unprivileged `launchctl list` contains processes that the root-`launchctl list` does not know about. So running a launctl command as root may cause it to fail.

I have never seen another UNIX-ish tool that would fail when run as root, but succeed otherwise.

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