The Info box has conveniently drilled into the package contents of the app to show the code's location and name: Samsung_Portable_SSD_Daemon. In this example, it's a daemon inside the wrapper of an application. The first line or two (underlined below in red) will show the path to the unwanted code on your Mac. Find the location of the process on your Mac by clicking the Info icon (small 'i') at the top of Activity Monitor.Ĭlick on the 'Open Files and Ports' tab. Awhile back, I had this unwanted process running on my Mac, shown in Activity Monitor.Ģ. The first step is to be sure about the name. (If you're curious, here's more on launchd.)ġ. That's if the installation has added it to the list of processes that will be started by OS X's process manager called launchd. Killing it from Activity Monitor will work temporarily, but the next time you reboot, it may start up again.

Let's say that you're sure that a process you see in Activity Monitor has to go. Its name typically ends with the letter 'd' but not always.)įor example, a developer may need to have some kind of support daemon always running in the background even when the app itself is not running. (A daemon is a process that runs in the background and has no user interface. You may suspect, as I did in the example below, that the installation procedure installed and scheduled a recurring support process-or perhaps a daemon. You just want the unwanted, left-over process gone.

But let's say you don't have one and don't want to invest in one. Some houskeeping utilities are able to find all the support files for an app and remove everything. But you still see a process running in Activity Monitor called, for example, spectre_daemon or spectred.

However, let's say that you just installed an OS X application called SPECTRE.app, decided to quit and delete the application completely. OS X is complicated and has many essential processes that shouldn't be tampered with. One should not, in general, willy-nilly remove an OS X process (a software program) just because you don't recognize it or don't know what it does. If you've ever gone through a software installation process, aborted it, and discovered that you have an unwanted process still running on your Mac, here's how to root it out and remove it.įirst up, a gentle warning.

Find activity monitor on mac terminal