‘Well, hurry up, I can’t breathe!’ Harry gasped, wrestling it as it curled around his chest.

‘Devil’s Snare, Devil’s Snare… what did Professor Sprout say? - it likes the dark and the damp -‘

‘So light a fire!’ Harry choked.

‘Yes- of course- but there’s no wood!’ Hermione cried, wringing her hands.

‘HAVE YOU GONE MAD?’ Ron bellowed. ‘ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?’

- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Sometimes I forget that I’m an engineer. No, this isn’t a story of how I wonder in amazement how laypeople can’t “do the simplest things with computers”. I try to catch myself when I think like that. No, this story is the opposite of that.

I’ve started dusting off my personal laptop again. For a long time, I’ve been playing with little bits and pieces of code on my work laptop, mostly because it was convenient and I didn’t care about ownership issues. But now I’m starting up a project that I might come to care about, so I need my personal laptop development-ready.

It had gathered a little dust, metaphorically speaking. No git installed; Homebrew and Macports (what was I thinking?), no Seil or Karabiner for Home Row Arrow Keys. And of course, Citrix Receiver installed and in the top bar on startup. Wait, what? When did this happen?

Looked for “Citrix” in Spotlight, looked for it in “System Preferences -> Accounts -> Startup Items”. Nada. Where is this danged thing?

“Uninstall Citrix Receiver Mac” -> Google. That gave me an uninstaller application from Citrix. What the hell, it’s Saturday morning. Who needs a brain? Let’s just run the “uninstaller”, like a Windows-using schmuck. But I restart and there’s the little icon staring at me again, smugly.

What now? Was I doomed to seeing this thing forever? Would I have to reset my Mac to factory settings? This things’s 7 years old; that would surely be the deathblow.

Almost at “give-up-ness”, I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Of course I have other options!

ps -ef | grep citrix

Nothing. Scratches chin

ps -ef

I don’t see anything named “Citrix”. Until…

Triumph! I know where the binary is! I can kill the process too! Only to have it come back, like an Inferi.

Who is doing this? The ppid says it’s launchd. Mystery solved. launchd’s daemons live in various places. Per the man page:

~/Library/LaunchAgents         Per-user agents provided by the user.
/Library/LaunchAgents          Per-user agents provided by the administrator.
/Library/LaunchDaemons         System-wide daemons provided by the administrator.
/System/Library/LaunchAgents   Per-user agents provided by Mac OS X.
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons  System-wide daemons provided by Mac OS X.

Conclusion: I need to challenge my brain more

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