What's the services/running processes manager in Mac OS X?

Solution 1:

For most of the "services" (called Daemons or Agents documented by Apple here and here) you can check:

In terminal: $ sudo launchctl list

For example only MySQL you can filter the output of the command above, like sudo launchctl list | grep -i mysql. Note -i is to make the filter case insensitive.

These also can be controlled with a GUI examples are Lingon and Launch Control.

There are some other "services", that will install themselves in:

/Library/StartupItems

For those, there is a command like $ ps -ef |grep /Library/StartupItems to view whether it is loaded and running. But there isn't a generic mechanism to stop, start or restart.

In which category your MySQL installation falls is impossible to say, as your question is lacking details on what exactly you have installed, what its source is, how it was installed, etcetera.

Solution 2:

The application "Activity Monitor" is located in /Applications/Utilities and will display all processes similar to the Unix command 'top'.

Solution 3:

No, cat concatenates or displays /dev/null which is the bit bucket or nothing so cat /dev/null shows me nothing.

Try ps -ef on the command line. This will show you process status everything full

To just see MySQL run

ps -ef | grep -i mysql