Enterprise Mac Security: Mac OS X Snow Leopard

2.7. Changing What Runs At Login

Launchd manages processes. However, there are other tools that traditional Unix or Mac engineers may look to for managing processes. These are all, in fact, going to be started by launchd. For example, SystemStarter is a tool that can automatically start items stored in /Library/StartupItems and /System/Library/StartupItems. As Mac OS X continues to transition much of the previous functionality of other facilities, such as the cron daemon, into launchd, development has also reduced the reliance on StartupItems (also known as SystemStarter, an older technology that has arguably been around since before Mac OS X 10.0). Even though many third-party applications still use StartupItems, Apple development prefers the ...