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There are several launch daemons/agents that start automatically and I wish they will not start automatically.

I have listed some services by running

$ launchctl list | grep -i 'safari\|siri\|photo\|map\|usernote\|contacts\|messages\|weather\|voice\|addressbook\|screentime\|game\|appstore\|speech\|airport\|location' | awk '{print $3}'

running launchctl stop <name> is not persistent for (re)boot. given the list above, for each daemon/agent how can i:

  1. permanently stop it?
  2. kill its process?
  3. disable/enable it from/to automatically start on boot?
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  • 3
    Unless you know exactly what you're doing, I would suggest you don't mess with your system like this. Unless you enjoy having a broken system or want to learn how/which things work together.
    – DarkDust
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 7:33
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    What is the exact proble that you are having with the machine? If you state that then we might be able to suggest solutions but leaving these running is not a problem, as far as I know.
    – mmmmmm
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 8:11
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    We can actually turn it upside-down: if disabling system daemons would solve problems, you'd read about it much more. The fact even power users don't do this is an indicator that it's not helpful.
    – DarkDust
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 9:07
  • thank you for all the suggestion, but not one gave an answer on my 3 questions :)
    – Mr.
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 18:19

1 Answer 1

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You're correct that using launchctl stop merely stops the program right now - i.e. it kills its processes. After you reboot the computer, you're back where you started.

In order to "permanently" stop the program, i.e. make sure it doesn't automatically start up after boot, you need instead to disable it:

launchctl disable <name>

You can reverse that again with a command like this:

launchctl enable <name>
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  • why is this better over loading\unloading the services? any clue how to do it correctly with launchctl load\unload?
    – Mr.
    Commented Apr 27, 2022 at 6:47
  • I did not say they were better - but you could argue that they are because this is the interface that Apple recommends you to use. The load/unload commands are legacy commands, meaning that they're included for backwards compatibility. In newer releases of macOS, those old commands could go away.
    – jksoegaard
    Commented Apr 27, 2022 at 7:46

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