How to use launchctl remove?

Targets macOS
1

I just noticed that my helper app isn’t properly unloaded.

A terminal command of “launchctl list |grep com.mothsoftware” gives the result of

[quote]39313 0 com.mothsoftware.mailarchiverx-helper.launchd

  • 0 com.mothsoftware.mailarchiverxpro-helper.76156[/quote]

The first one is the one I need to kill. According to the man page I need to use “launchctl remove com.mothsoftware.mailarchiverx-helper.launchd”. But when I check again with the first command I don’t see a change.

Here is the full plist of the LaunchAgent file:

[quote]{
EnvironmentVariables = {
PATH = “/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public:/Users/beatrixwillius 1:/usr/local/sbin”;
};
KeepAlive = YES;
Label = “com.mothsoftware.mailarchiverx-helper.launchd”;
ProgramArguments = (
"/Applications/Mail Archiver X/Mail Archiver X.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/Mail Archiver X .app/Contents/MacOS/Mail Archiver X ",
);
QueueDirectories = ();
RunAtLoad = YES;
WatchPaths = ();
}[/quote]

What am I doing wrong?

High Sierra.

2

I remember about such an issue in past…
Does unload instead of remove work for you?
See e.g. stackoverflow or Apple Communities for details.

3

perhaps the man pages notes about deprecated and removed functionality helps ?
here it says (on 10.12.6 and I assume its similar on 10.13 and 10.14)

Note NO input from STDIN

Are you getting a non-zero result code after running that command ?

4 
launchctl unload /Users/beatrixwillius\\ 1/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mothsoftware.mailarchiverx-helper.launchd.plist

gives an error

@Norman Palardy: right now I’m using terminal commands. What do you mean with “NO Input from STDIN”?

5

basically STDIN is the terminal
if you run your command in terminal and follow it with

echo $?

what do you see the echo print ?
thats the result of the last command and if its not 0 then launchctl is not executing your command successfully

6

For Valentina a

[code]if [ -e /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.paradigmasoft.vserver_x64.plist ] ; then
echo “Trying to stop the current VServer”

sudo -S launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.paradigmasoft.vserver_x64.plist

fi[/code]

works fine. Am I escaping my username wrong? When I execute:

launchctl unload /Users/beatrixwillius\\ 1/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mothsoftware.mailarchiverx-helper.launchd.plist echo $?

the second line gives a 0.

7

my code looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
##################################################
# Script to stop and unload Xojo webapps
##################################################
# Settings:
#
# label = unique id in reverse DNS format
# plist = location of the plist file
#  Note: don't escape spaces!
##################################################

label=com.mycompany.myapp
plist="/Users/username/Library/LaunchAgents/$label.plist"

echo "##################################################"
echo "# Stopping job (if any) "
echo "# $label"
echo "##################################################"
launchctl stop $label

echo "##################################################"
echo "# Unloading job (if any)"
echo "# $plist"
echo "##################################################"
launchctl unload $plist

echo '##################################################'
echo "$label has been stopped"
echo '##################################################'
9

@Michael Diehr : thanks, I’ll try your script out. I think the space in my username is the problem.