I've never had great understanding of launchctl but the deprecation of the old commands with launchctl 2 (10.10) has been terrible as all resources only cover the old commands, and documentation for Apple utilities is generally disgracefully bad, with launchctl not dissembling.
Mad props to https://babodee.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/launchctl-2-0-syntax/ which contains most details
Internally, launchd has several domains, but launchctl 1 would only ask for service names, inferring the domain based on context. This made for straightforward commands (once you've loaded a plist you just use the service name it specifies) but had rough edge cases or odd behaviours.
Launchctl 2 separates service names, domain targets and service targets:
- a service target is
<domain-target>/<service-name>and used to point to most services - a service name is what is specified in the plist file
- a domain target is a namespace for services, each namespace has specific behaviours associated:
systemis privileged (runs services as root) and requires root for interactionuser/<uid>runs as that user, but does not require that the user be logged ingui/<uid>runs as that user, but is only active when the user is logged in at the GUI
The paths can be plist files, XPC bundles, or directories of them. Each plist or bundle is loaded into the specified domain.
Unloads the specified service(s).
The paths are actually optional, you can unload an entire domain, which you probably should not do.
Marks the service as runnable (or not), allows overriding a Disabled plist key.
Behaviour is a bit odd and I haven't looked much into it, you may need to bootstrap a service
(it will complain that the service is disabled), enable it, then bootstrap it again.
Starts a service. -k will kill then restart existing instances.
Supposedly -p will print the service's pid (even if it's already started), doesn't seem to work for me.
Dumps the service's definition, properties & metadata.
The output of print is not officially structured, do not rely either on the format or on the information.
Prints the domain's metadata, including but not limited to all services in the domain.
Sends a signal to a service's process (without having to look it up manually).
@theKosh Any, I seem to have lost the ability to launch any service in ~/Library/LaunchAgents - they all launch fine with user/501 but fail to launch with gui/501, the error I get is:
However the permissions seem fine and they launch without issues using user/501:
I recently updated to 13.1 and moved my home directory from /Users/hackeron to /Volumes/Data/home/hackeron as the internal SSD is 256GB, not sure if this is related to these changes and not quite sure what to try next. Any guesses?