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 online, but it just doesn't work.

What's the problem?? below is the plist file for my service.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>syncmyproject</string>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/syncmyproject.log</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/syncmyproject.log</string>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>
    <key>Debug</key>
    <true/>
    <key>EnableGlobbing</key>
    <true/>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/local/bin/unison</string>
      <string>-auto</string>
      <string>-batch</string>
      <string>-repeat watch</string>
      <string>~/home/project</string>
      <string>~/project</string>
    </array>
</dict>
</plist>

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

[Ran into this problem as well, so documenting what I've found]

"78" is the last exit code of the job you're running. From man launchctl :

With no arguments, list all of the jobs loaded into launchd in three columns. The first column displays the PID of the job if it is run- ning. The second column displays the last exit status of the job . If the number in this column is negative, it represents the negative of the signal which stopped the job. Thus, "-15" would indicate that the job was terminated with SIGTERM. The third column is the job's label. If [label] is specified, prints information about the requested job.

Ie you need to read the documentation (or source code) for whatever job you're starting. (In my case, mysqld)

It's worth noting that "78" is mentioned as a standard exit code on Linux, indicating a configuration error. So take a look at your job configuration (and error logs?) to see if you have something misconfigured.

Answer 4

To view a description of all error codes, type

launchctl error <insert numerical error code here>

eg:

% launchctl error 77 77: No locks available

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

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 7

就我而言， <ProgramArguments>脚本不可执行，因此78 function not implemented.

Answer 8

I got this error while trying to run mono to start a local webserver. Turns out the fix was to not use the mono path given by "which mono" (which is a symlink: /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/mono ) but the actual location of the exe (in my case /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Commands/mono ).

Answer 9

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...

Answer 10

I was chasing for the status 78 error for a long time.

My LaunchDamon could be started by hand with status 0 , but after a system reboot it has the status 78. Sometimes the daemon was running, sometimes it was not.

Using the app LaunchControl ( which is great btw.) didn't help in this case. There was no output in the standard out and err files.

I could solve the problem by adding a KeepAlive condition to the daemons plist file, referencing a mounted file system where the daemon executable resides.

<key>KeepAlive</key>
<dict>
    <key>PathState</key>
    <dict>
    <key>/Volumes/MountedFileSystem</key>
    <true/>
    </dict>
</dict>

I hope this tip might help someone.