what does launchd status 78 mean?? why my user agent not running??

Question

I want to run a unison sync service running in the background whenever I login. But the status code of my agent is 78. I don\'t know why, I tried some fix posted on

Answer 1

I read man launchctl, find 78 means function not implemented. It doesn't help much.

Finally I make it work, actually there were errors in the plist, I recommend to install the brew cask install launchcontrol, which is a gui tool for launchctl, it can help detect errors and trouble shooting.

Answer 2

I found the error had to do with permissions. I was trying to redirect errors and logs to the /var/log directory which my user is not able to write to. Changing the path to something where my user had proper permissions to r+w fixed it.

Also, be careful when loading your LaunchAgents. Do not use sudo to load a plist if you are in the ~/Library/LaunchAgents directory.

Answer 3

Similar to above I was getting a status 78 because I had symlink in my script path. The fix was to use the absolute path.

Answer 4

In my case, script in <ProgramArguments> is not executable and thus get 78 function not implemented.

Answer 5

Here's what caught me: In Mac OS X you can run shell-scripts from command-line even if there's "just the script" in the file. However, when you run them from launchd you have to tell which binary that should run the script. A suppose that when you run from command-line it just uses the shell you are currently in (in my case bash), but when running from launchd there is no "surrounding script". I added

#!/bin/sh

as the first line in the script file, and then it worked.

Answer 6

I'm keeping getting 78 code for the sake of xml format issue:

At first, My emacs auto reformat my xml like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>user.eric.g.autosyncdropbox.agent</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/Users/eric/G/bin/fswatchG.sh</string>
    </array>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true />
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>
    /Users/eric/.tmp/user.eric.g.autosyncdropbox.out.log</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>
    /Users/eric/.tmp/user.eric.g.autosyncdropbox.error.log</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

And I was not able to find these two line is returned...

    <string>
    /Users/eric/.tmp/user.eric.g.autosyncdropbox.out.log</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>
    /Users/eric/.tmp/user.eric.g.autosyncdropbox.error.log</string>

That was sucks, and absolutely a waste of life...