All that the touch
command that you ran did was to update the modification date and time of the launchd.conf
file under the /etc/
directory to the date and time when you ran the command (for example, if you ran it on say, April 13, 2014 at 8 a.m. your time, this file's modification time would've been set to that date and time). You can see the date and time on this file by typing ls -l /etc/launchd.conf
in Terminal.app
.
The side effect of the command was to make OS X assume that this file has changed (because of a newer modification date/time) even though its contents have not been changed. So the slower startup time you're seeing should be a temporary thing. Assuming you didn't actually change the /etc/launchd.conf
file through any other means, the startup duration should return back to what you had before.
For information on launchd
, the "system wide and per-user daemon/agent manager", see the following:
Wikipedia - launchd
launchd tutorial
OS X Man Pages - launchd.conf(5)
OS X Man Pages - launchd(8)