Avoiding all apps reopening when OS X crashes

Sometimes my computer will crash and restart due to unknown errors. It usually happens when I'm working on something so a few apps are open. OS X has this annoying feature where it tries to reopen all apps when you restart. You can disable it when manually restarting, but it still does it if the computer restarts after a crash.

I think this feature was built to save time, but all it does is waste more time than it's worth, because whenever the computer restarts from a crash I usually just restart it once more (this time with "Reopen apps" disabled) just to get to a workable state. The problem is it'll keep spawning apps and preventing the restart from happening.

Disabling this feature would prevent me having to restart after a crash altogether. Is there a way to stop OS X from doing this?

Solution 1:

Permanently prevent macOS High Sierra from reopening apps after a restart

Works in macOS El Capitan, Yosemite, Sierra, High Sierra.

Solution: deny OS X access to the file it uses to store your session state. It prevents reopening apps even after reboot/shutdown from Terminal, from AppleScript, and system crash.

GUI method

1. Open Finder
2. Cmd+Shift+G (Go to folder)
3. Copypaste ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/ and confirm
4. Find the file starting with com.apple.loginwindow
5. Doubleclick (opens in TextEdit)
6. Remove all content and save the empty file. An additional confirmation dialog may appear.
7. Right click, Get Info
8. Lock the file (check the checkbox)

GUI method (undo)

If you wish to undo this change later and re-enable the feature, simply delete this file and the OS will recreate it.

1. Open Finder
2. Cmd+Shift+G (Go to folder)
3. Copypaste ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/ and confirm
4. Locate the file starting with com.apple.loginwindow
5. Simply delete it

CLI method

1. Open Terminal.app

2. Make the file owned by root (otherwise the OS will just replace it)

   sudo chown root ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow*
   

3. Remove all permissions, so it can't be read or written to

   sudo chmod 000 ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow*
   

CLI method (undo)

1. Re-enable "reopen all apps" after login

   sudo rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow*
   

Solution 2:

I found @babca's approach works well, but on macOS Catalina for me it was slightly different. I had two com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/ and they were not plain text - com.apple.loginwindow.AB6XXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXX5291.plist and com.apple.loginwindow.111XXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXAC43.plist.

So I did the following two steps for each file:

Opened (⌘-O) each Finder into XCode (the default I think in Catalina), removed all the entries under TALAppsToRelaunchAtLogin, and saved the file.

Got Info (⌘-I) for each in Finder then check Locked checkbox. Note the preview box shows an empty <array/> inside TALAppsToRelaunchAtLogin.

To undo this change, repeat just the last step for each file but uncheck the Locked checkbox.

Solution 3:

I introduce a different solution to satisfy a few additional requirements of my own that make it more versatile. The requirements are:

1. It must be from the command line so I can copy and paste rather than clumsily click through a UI.
2. It must be something that can be put in a for loop so I can modify every user on a machine. (DevOps anyone?) Additionally the code should still be able to stand alone, not requiring a for loop, so an end user can run it themselves for themselves.
3. It must be able to handle the home directory being in a non-standard location.

With the help of code located here, I came up with the following, which works in sh and bash on Catalina and Big Sur at minimum...

# set user name, machine uuid, and home dir
someUser=$(stat -f%Su /dev/console)
machineUUID=$(ioreg -rd1 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice | awk -F'"' '/IOPlatformUUID/{print $4}')
homeDir=$(dscacheutil -q user -a name ${someUser} | grep 'dir:' | awk '{print $2}')

# delete the plist array
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Delete :TALAppsToRelaunchAtLogin' ${homeDir}/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.${machineUUID}.plist

# make the file readonly
chflags uimmutable ${homeDir}/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.${machineUUID}.plist