Inspired by this AskDifferent post, this is a little mashup of sfltool + awk that enumerates, parses and outputs details about your Mac's Startup Items/Login Items, which are stored in a Background Task Management aka BTM database.
This information is normally shown with very limited info in System Settings → General → Login Items. For example:
Note how it's missing any information about what or where those programs are, Bundle IDs, file paths, etc. Not very useful.
Clone this repo (if you don't know how to do that, click the green Code button above, then Download ZIP) and copy the login-items-dump script to your /usr/local/bin directory. You can then run the command from a Terminal.
Open a Terminal and type
login-items-dump
N.B. executing
sfltool dumpbtmrequires root permissions, so you will likely be asked for your password. For unattended scripting, you can useSUDO_ASKPASSto avoid the password prompt, but that's beyond the scope of this README.
The output is tab-separated, and contains 5 columns which should contain useful information:
- UUID
- Name (DeveloperName) (daemons are prefixed with a 👿 emoji)
- BundleID
- URL (typically a URL-encoded file path)
- ExecPath
You can parse the output further with your favorite unix tools like grep, sed, or awk.
Note about Daemons If you see "affects all users" in small text below the item in the Settings app, it indicates that item is a daemon. That 👿 may help you identify such items when there are multiple items with the same Name. For example:
Output in neatly formatted columns
( printf "UUID\tName\tBundleID\tURL\tExecPath\n"; login-items-dump; ) | column -s$'\t' -t
To squeeze and truncate the output so it fits better on a single line, try
login-items-dump | sed 's/\t/ /g' | cut -c-$((COLUMNS-5))
To search for Google stuff
login-items-dump | grep -i google
If you see something you don't like, you can reset the entire BTM database (careful, you will have to reset all your startup apps) with:
sfltool resetbtm
For more information about background task management, you may want to read Apple's Manage login items and background tasks on Mac page.
