Restarting and managing services on Mac OS X

Method 1

Searching running processes to get he PID, then killing it (The service will automatically restart).

Example

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1. sudo ps -A | grep -i ssh

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23450 ?? S 0:00.12 /usr/sbin/sshd -i
23455 ?? S 0:00.03 /usr/sbin/sshd -i
23649 p8 S+ 0:00.00 grep -i ssh


Now use 'kill' on the PID...

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1. sudo kill 23450

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Method 2

launchd is a unified, open-source service management framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, applications, processes, and scripts. Written and designed by Dave Zarzycki at Apple, it was introduced with Mac OS X Tiger and is licensed under the Apache License.

We will be using launchctl, a subset of this framework to manage services...

List all services

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1. launchctl list

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We can then use this list to identify the names of our services.

Here's an example with SSH...

Stopping a service

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1. launchctl stop com.openssh.sshd

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Starting a service

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1. launchctl start com.openssh.sshd

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