Launchd Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Terminally Geeky: How to tell if a script is being called from launchd

by TJ Luoma (Feb 25th, 2013)

Warning: command line geekiness ahead. When writing shell scripts, I often send interactive output to the user via echo to give feedback or information. But if the shell script is called on a schedule via OS X's behind-the-scenes process launcher launchd, rather than from a Terminal session, ...

Finding Dropbox 'conflicted copy' files automatically

by TJ Luoma (Feb 20th, 2013)

Dropbox is a great tool, but if you use it on more than one computer, you are bound to find conflicted copies eventually. A conflicted copy is created when the same file is edited on two different computers at the same time, or close enough that Dropbox cannot tell which one is the newest. The ...

Lingon and launchd can keep crucial apps always running

by TJ Luoma (Oct 30th, 2012)

Two years ago I wrote about a shell script that I used with cron to keep 'critical' applications running. Some of the commenters suggested that I "should" be using launchd. There are times when I still prefer cron over launchd but there are two reasons why I have started using launchd more often. ...

Terminally Geeky: use automatic login more securely

by TJ Luoma (Mar 7th, 2011)

Imagine if you rebooted your computer, and it automatically logged you in, launched all of your login apps, updated your Dropbox folder, MobileMe, email, RSS, Twitter and everything else without you even having to enter your password. That auto-login capability is built into your Mac, and in fact, ...

Manually schedule Software Update 'the OS X way' with launchd

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 10th, 2010)

In response to a Macworld article, TidBits' Chris Pepper elaborated on ways to run Software Update, Apple's means of delivering updates and patches, on your own schedule. Beginning with the fact that Software Update schedules its next update based on the time it's currently being run, setting the ...

Automatically restart crashed programs

by Mat Lu (Apr 24th, 2007)

Over at Macworld Rob Griffiths has a great column on automatically restarting a program after a crash. Although it is much more stable these days, for a while last year Quicksilver was constantly crashing on me and often I wouldn't notice until ? + space was strangely unavailing. If there's any ...

Trigger backups on connect with launchd

by Michael Rose (Dec 25th, 2006)

The fine folks at macresearch.org have put out an interesting tutorial that walks through setting up launchd and rsync to do automatic backups whenever a specific external drive is mounted. Loyal readers may note that this is similar to the core feature of Martian Lifeboat (which should not be ...