Configure OS X Launchd with Lingon

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Today I had a look at my system.log of my MacBook Pro. There I had to face a bad surprise. A program from Smithmicro, the famous vendor of StuffIt, which I had installed months ago and have already uninstalled, causes big trouble on my system. Somewhere in the launchd, so syslog has reported, is an agent, which calls a folder (and certainly the program in it), that does not exist anymore.

My first idea was to somehow destroy this program using the Terminal of OS X, since I have some experience with command line tools from my Debian-server. But you can not call launchd directly, it has just the option to call it in the debug modus, which I did not want, since I knew the problem.

A quick search with Google revealed the tool Lingon in the macosxhints forum.

LingonScreen.png


The program is quite small and thus easy to download. After unzipping you can directly used it. For the usual security issues/protection within OS X you will be asked to enter your administration password, since launchd is a system daemon and requires root right.

You can now edit your launchd configuration, with adding new services (or agents, as they are called in Lingon), plists and so on. When you have selected one agent, you can reveal it via the "File > Show in Finder"-option.
This is how I found my old entries really fast and deleted them. Just to say it here, that is not the way to do it safely. Make a backup of your file first. But since I have a complete Time Machine Backup every day of my system I have decided to do it the quick and dirty way...

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