How to Remove “Allow in the Background” Item on macOS
When uninstalling an application on macOS, it might sometimes leave behind some configuration on your Mac. In my case, when I uninstalled NoMachine, an “Allow in the Background” item was left behind. Here’s how you can remove the “Allow in the Background” item on macOS.
Removing the Orphaned “Allow in the Background” item on macOS
To remove the orphaned item left behind by an uninstalled application, there’s a few ways to do that.
The quick and easy, but slightly inconvenient way
The easiest way is to use the command sfltool resetbtm. This will reset all the items that are already allowed to run in the background. While it’s not necessary, you will find quite a number of old entries from applications that you may already have uninstalled, even if it is no longer loading any items in the background. Case in point, I only see 19 items on the Settings screen, but there are 40 items listed when I run the sfltool dumpbtm command.
Warning: Do note that doing a rest will remove all of the login items, both Open at Login and Allow in the Background. 🙂
After doing this, you will want to restart your Mac to complete the reset. Once restarted, the list of allowed background items will now contain applications that are still on your Mac. The Open at Login items will still be empty. I noticed some applications will “forget” that it has been set not to open on startup. Also, you will need to manually add the applications you want to open at login.
A bit of an inconvenience but I took as an opportunity to clean it up. 🙂
The slightly longer but more specific approach
First, we use the sfltool dumpbtm command to get information of all the background task items. It would dump quite a fair bit of information to your terminal. Here, you want to find the exact item you want to remove and see where the location of the item is.
In the example above, you can see that the NoMachines item has an entry with the URL pointing to the /Library/LaunchAgents directory. This is where the login items are usually installed. But as you may see, some of the entries would have the items located in different locations. That’s why this slftool dumpbtm command is useful.
Now, just delete the item as listed. In my case, this would be to run the following command. You will need to sudo it as /Library is a privileged location.
sudo rm /Library/LaunchAgents/com.nomachine.uninstallAgent.plist
Once done, the item will no longer be seen in the list of items that is allowed to run in the background.
Hopefully this guide has helped you delete your orphaned “Allow in the Background” item too.
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