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WHAT IS LAUNCHD, AND WHY IS IT RUNNING ON MY MAC?

Justin Pot
Justin Pot
Writer


Justin Pot has been writing about technology for over a decade, with work
appearing in Digital Trends, The Next Web, Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and the Zapier
Blog. He also runs the Hillsboro Signal, a volunteer-driven local news outlet he
founded. Read more...

About How-To Geek
@jhpot

Updated Jul 31, 2017, 6:53 pm EDT | 1 min read

You’re scrolling through Activity Monitor when you notice a process you’re not
familiar with: launchd. Should you be worried? No: this is actually a core part
of macOS.

RELATED: What Is This Process and Why Is It Running on My Mac?

This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in
Activity Monitor, like kernel_task, hidd, mdsworker, installd, WindowServer,
blued, and many others. Don’t know what those services are? Better start
reading!

This particular process, launchd, is the service management framework used by
macOS, similar in some ways to Service Control Manager on Windows or systemd on
many Linux distributions. A “service” is anything running in the background; on
macOS these are commonly referred to as daemons and generally have names ending
with the letter “d.” Most everything your Mac does—connecting to networks,
showing things on the display, and backing up your files—is done by a daemon on
some level.




When you turn on your Mac, launchd is one of the first things launched, after
the kernel. This is why launchd has the Process ID, or PID, of 1, on every Mac
system.



The only lower number is 0, which belongs to the kernel, represented here as
kernel_task.

Advertisement



After launching, launchd proceeds to to launch all of the other daemons your Mac
needs in order to run. After you Mac starts up, launchd continues running in the
background to check that daemons are still running, and to launch any daemons
needed later to run your various programs.

It’s very rare for launchd to take up many system resources, and when it does
happen, rebooting your Mac is usually enough to fix it. Occasionally a buggy
program trying to launch faulty daemons can cause launchd to use up a bunch of
CPU. If you’ve installed something recently, try removing that and seeing if it
helps.

For the most part, launchd isn’t anything users need to think about, but it is
possible to interface with it directly thanks to launchctl, a Termianl tool for
interfacing with launcd. Type launchctl list and you’ll see a list of every
background service currently running on your Mac.



Messing with this much more is not a good idea unless you’re a very advanced
user, but anyone interested can type launchctl help for a list of potential
subcommands, or reading this advanced launchd tutorial.

READ NEXT
 * › What Is the powerd Process, and Why Is It Running on My Mac?
 * › What Is “dbfseventsd,” And Why Is It Running on my Mac?
 * › What is AppleSpell and Why is it Running on my Mac?
 * › What Is “parentalcontrolsd”, and Why Is It Running on My Mac?
 * › What Is mDNSResponder, And Why Is It Running On My Mac?
 * › What Are assistant_service and assistantd, and Why Are They Running on my
   Mac?
 * › What Is trustd, and Why Is It Running on my Mac?
 * › Stop Using Notepad

Justin Pot
Justin Pot has been writing about technology for over a decade, with work
appearing in Digital Trends, The Next Web, Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and the Zapier
Blog. He also runs the Hillsboro Signal, a volunteer-driven local news outlet he
founded.
Read Full Bio »



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The above article may contain affiliate links, which help support How-To Geek.

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