CLI Apps

ed apps

ed apps is the System page's Running apps card on stdout: what is running on this Mac right now, and a way to quit any of it, one app at a time or everything at once. Reach for it when you want the list without opening a window, or when a script needs a quiet desktop before something noisy runs.

The two verbs sit on opposite sides of a line. Listing reads the process table directly and needs nothing. Quitting cannot be done by ed at all: sending a quit event is Automation, and that grant belongs to the Edith bundle rather than to a command line process, so ed asks the menu bar app to send it and exits 4 when Edith is closed.

At a glance

Command	What it does
ed apps ls	Lists every app with a Dock presence, with its pid and bundle id. Runs when you type ed apps with no subcommand, and answers to ed apps list.
ed apps quit	Asks Edith to quit one app by name, bundle id or prefix, or everything except Finder and Edith with --all.

Commands

• ed apps ls
• ed apps quit

Exit codes

Code	When
0	The list was printed, the count was reported, or the quit request was posted. --help and --version also exit 0.
1	ed apps quit was given neither an app name nor --all, or was given both.
2	The command line was wrong in the ordinary way: an unknown flag, a second positional argument, or a value the parser could not read.
3	The named app is not running, or the name is a prefix that matches more than one running app.
4	ed apps quit was run while the Edith menu bar app was not running. Every form is affected, including the --all dry run.

ed apps ls only ever exits 0 or 2. Code 1 is otherwise the catch-all for an unexpected error escaping either command, and nothing on the listing path throws one.

Notes and gotchas

• ed apps with no subcommand is ed apps ls, and ed apps list is the same command again. Completion offers ls and quit; the list alias works but is not among the candidates.
• ed app and ed apps are different groups. The singular one acts on Edith itself, open, quit, relaunch and update checks; the plural one acts on everything else running on the Mac. There is no prefix matching between subcommand names, so the two never collide, but the names are one letter apart and easy to mistype.
• Nothing completes an app name. ed apps quit <TAB> offers nothing at all, because the completion tree declares that argument free-form and the engine only proposes flags once the word you are on already starts with a -, so ed apps quit -<TAB> is the one that lists --all, --force, --yes, --json and --help. ed apps ls is the discovery step.
• The two argument errors on quit exit 1 rather than 2 even though they read like usage errors. Gate on 1 as well as 2 if you are distinguishing a bad command line from a real failure.
• Order of checks beats specificity of message. With Edith closed, ed apps quit nosuchapp exits 4 rather than 3, because the app check runs before the name is resolved. Start Edith before trusting a 3 or a 4 from this command to mean what it says.
• The --all preview is not free of the app requirement either. It counts nothing and posts nothing, but it still exits 4 when Edith is closed.
• The count --all prints is computed by ed and the quitting is done by the helper a moment later against its own fresh list. An app launched or closed in between changes what happens without changing what was printed.
• An empty app name matches every app rather than none, because the empty string is a prefix of everything: ed apps quit "" exits 3 and lists all of them. It is a harmless way to see the resolver's ambiguity message.
• Exact name beats exact bundle id beats unique prefix, and the prefix rule applies to names only. ed apps quit com.spotify matches nothing even though ed apps quit com.spotify.client works.
• Object keys are sorted in every document this group emits, so two runs diff cleanly. Array order is insertion order, which for ls is the name order the table shows.
• Both commands see only apps with a Dock presence. Menu bar agents, helpers and daemons are invisible to ls and unreachable by quit, which is also why ed apps quit --all never touches the menu bar helper it is talking to.
• The UI path and the CLI path funnel through the same RunningApps helper, so the System page's per-row quit button, its Quit all apps header button and these commands cannot disagree about what is protected or about what --force means. The difference is which process runs it: the UI quits from the main window's process, ed quits from the menu bar helper's.
• The UI asks before it acts, with a confirmation dialog naming the app or the count. --yes is the command line's version of that dialog, and it exists only for --all. A single named app quits without any confirmation.

Where to go next

• ed app for acting on Edith itself rather than on other apps, including quitting and relaunching it.
• ed system for CPU and memory per process on this Mac, covering everything running and not only the apps with a Dock icon.
• ed machines power for the same idea on another machine, where ed machines kill signals a remote process.
• Conventions and contracts for the exit code table, the --json guarantee and the full list of what needs the app running.
• The ed command line for the rest of the reference.