How do background processes run without showing up in the Activity Monitor?

[0dev]

I've been running Little Snitch today (a great app for us paranoid types 😉) and I got a pop-up saying Google Updater wanted to connect to a Google server. I did some research and found out that it's a background OS X process. Fair enough, but thing is, it isn't showing up in Activity Monitor at all.

So, here's my non-app-specific question: how can a program run in the background on my Mac without even showing up in Activity Monitor?

 

[robbieduncan]

Are you showing "All Processes" or just "My Proccesses"?

 

[0dev]

All processes.

 

[Tyr.]

It can't, it runs periodically and for very short periods and you probably just missed in the process list. You can remove it BTW.

 

[0dev]

Ahh, that makes sense. So what controls which apps are running periodically on my Mac then? launchd?

I know I can remove it but next time I use Chrome or something it'll only get reinstalled anyway.

 

[Jagardn]

Ahh, that makes sense. So what controls which apps are running periodically on my Mac then? launchd?

I know I can remove it but next time I use Chrome or something it'll only get reinstalled anyway.

Launchd controls it all. You can check what's running by entering "launchd list" in the terminal. "launchd stop job-name" will kill a job. "launchd unload job-name" will remove the specified job from starting up automatically. Be careful, if you unload an important job, you could cause yourself a lot of problems.

 

[0dev]

Entering "launchd list" in the Terminal just tells me "This program is not meant to be run directly."

 

[ScoobyMcDoo]

Entering "launchd list" in the Terminal just tells me "This program is not meant to be run directly."

Use launchctl instead of launchd

 

[0dev]

Right, I did that and found com.google.keystone.user.agent listed. A bit of Googling told me this was indeed the Google Updater and that deleting the LaunchDaemon stops it from running itself, so I just removed its respective plist file from ~/Library/LaunchDaemons.

Should be all sorted now hopefully, let's just wait and see if Google put it back at any point.