How can I find what process is starting apps in the background?

I keep seeing CIJScannerRegister running. I'd like it to never run. Every time it appears I use launchctl to remove its listing and that kills the app. But it reappears later. I know where CIJScannerRegister lives and could delete it, but I would rather get whatever is starting it to not start it. I've looked through /System/Library/Launch{Agents,Daemons} and cannot find any matching entry in there. How can I find the process that is launching it and tell it to stop?

Solution 1:

CIJScannerRegister is of no use if you don't have an old Canon Inkjet, but Mavericks really wants to have it running all the time.

It's in /Library/Image Capture/Support/LegacyDeviceDiscoveryHelpers, but if you remove it it will appear again in the form of a "Canon Inkjet Printer Software Update" in the App Store.

The only solution I found was to delete the executable inside the app bundle so the OS thinks it's still installed but it can't run.

In Terminal:

killall CIJScannerRegister
cd /Library/Image\ Capture/Support/LegacyDeviceDiscoveryHelpers/CIJScannerRegister.app/Contents/MacOS/
sudo rm CIJScannerRegister

Solution 2:

You can use the PPID to find out which process started another process :

ps axo stat,ppid,pid,comm

PPID referes to the PID of the process who started it.

Solution 3:

Run Activity Monitor (from /Applications/Utilities), click on the CIJScannerRegister process, then press Cmd+I (or use the Inspect button or go to View > Inspect Process). You will see the Parent Process: field show the name and the process id of the process that launched it.