Create a list of login (startup) items' paths

Nov 28, '05 07:08:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Login Items can cause conflicts in OS X just as in earlier Mac systems. You can reorder them, or delete them, in the Accounts System Preferencespane. Unfortunately, there is no way to temporarily turn off a Login Item. What if you turn them all off, then figure who was causing trouble, and want to turn the others back on? If, before you deleted them, you had mouse-overed each item, a yellow box would have appeared, displaying the path. If you were _very_ quick, you could have written down the often-lengthy path before it disappeared. (Some of these paths are complex, with the Login Item buried deeply within an application package.)

But there's an easier way! Simply open a terminal window and type in this command at the prompt, and press Return:

defaults read loginwindow | grep Path
The Terminal will display a list of all the paths to all your Login Items. Simply copy and paste the list in to a word processor, and save it where convenient for later reference. The output will look something like this (varying based on what you have installed, obviously):
$ defaults read loginwindow | grep Path
    Path = "/System/Library/CoreServices/System\ Events.app";
    Path = "/Applications/Utilities/PandoCalendarU0192/PandoCalendar.app";
    Path = "/Applications/Utilities/StuffIt Deluxe9.0/MagicMenu.app";
    ...


The above tip is courtesy of Fred Moore and Doc O'Leary, who sent it to me via email. I've often wondered why OS X didn't give you an easy way to disable individual login items -- holding Shift at login will disable all of them, but there's no selective control. While this tip won't provide that, it at least will give you an easy way to reinstall any that you manually remove. To create your list in a one-step operation, use this variation of the above command:
$ defaults read loginwindow | grep Path > ~/Desktop/login_items.txt
This won't generate any onscreen output, but will dump the output directly into a text file (named login_items.txt in this example) on your Desktop.

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