I have created an app, that sets itself to launch at Login using SMLoginItemSetEnabled
. Here is the code it uses. My question is, how can I manually remove this app from launching at login?
The app does not show under "Login Items", or /Library/LaunchAgents
, or /Library/LaunchDaemons
or in the /Users/username/Library/LaunchAgents
, or /Users/username/Library/LaunchDaemons
folders. I looked around in /Library/Preferences
and PreferecePanes
, but I found nothing. The app does load on login.
Best Answer
You can stop the item from launching with
launchctl disable gui/$UID/bundle-id
.If you don't know the bundle ID, you can find it by typing
launchctl list
. That will list all processes running under your user, with their PIDs in the first column. So, if you saw this:…you could use Activity Monitor to confirm that the unwanted app's PID is 189, which makes its bundle ID
com.example.ExampleDaemon
. Then:That's it. There is still a record of the login item on disk, just disabled. If you want to purge it, or just want to learn more, read on.
Counterintuitively (but amusingly?), the list is saved here:
That file will look something like this:
Yes, the
false
means that an app with that bundle id should be launched at startup. After runninglaunchctl disable
, thefalse
will change to atrue
. (As far as I can tell, launchd doesn't write these files right away, so you may not see this until you reboot.) You can see the disabled items with this command:There's also some extra info about each login item stored here, but removing it won't stop the item from launching:
Any changes you make while the system is running will be overwritten when you shut down/restart. So, as far as I can tell, the only way to completely remove an item from
disabled.$UID.plist
is to reboot in single user mode and make the edits there. Even without having runlaunchctl disable
, removing akey
/false
pair from this file stops the app from launching at login. I'm not going to include instructions for editing these files in single user mode in this answer.