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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T14:11:28+00:00

I have an application with 2 components: a desktop application that users interact with,

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I have an application with 2 components: a desktop application that users interact with, and a background process that can be enabled from the desktop application. Once the background process is enabled, it will run as a user launch agent independently of the desktop app.

However, what I’m wondering is what to do when the user disables the background process. At this point I want to stop the background process but I’m not sure what the best approach is. The 3 options that I see are:

  1. Use the ‘kill’ command.
    • Direct, but not reliable and just seems somewhat “wrong”.
  2. Use an NSMachPort to send an exit request from the desktop app to the background process.
    • This is the best approach I’ve thought of but I’ve run into an implementation problem (I’ll be posting this in a separate query) and I’d like to be sure that the approach is right before going much further.
  3. Something else???

Thank you in advance for any help/insight that you can offer.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The daemon could handle quit apple events or listen on a CFMessagePort.

    If you use signals you should handle the signal, probably SIG_QUIT, that is sent instead of just letting the system kill your process.

    If you have cleanup that may take a while, use something other than signals. If you are basically just calling exit, then signals are fine.

    If you already have a CFRunLoop going then use CFMessagePort. If you are already handling apple events than handle quit.

    CFMessagePort is a wrapper around CFMachPort that provides a name and some other conveniences. You can also use the NS wrappers for either.

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