Removing Little Snitch completely (Mac OS X Snow Leopard)

Question

I uninstalled Little Snitch months ago. Or so, I thought.

When opening Console.app, I see something like this:

Here’s a textual log:

21/11/09 22:05:31   com.apple.launchd[1]    (at.obdev.littlesnitchd[10045]) Exited with exit code: 1
21/11/09 22:05:31   com.apple.launchd[1]    (at.obdev.littlesnitchd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
21/11/09 22:05:33   Little Snitch UIAgent[10046]    2.0.4.385: m65968c1c
21/11/09 22:05:33   Little Snitch UIAgent[10046]    2.0.4.385: m579328b9
21/11/09 22:05:33   Little Snitch UIAgent[10046]    2.0.4.385: m41531ded
21/11/09 22:05:33   com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[170]  (at.obdev.LittleSnitchUIAgent) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
21/11/09 22:05:41   com.apple.launchd[1]    (at.obdev.littlesnitchd[10049]) Exited with exit code: 1
21/11/09 22:05:41   com.apple.launchd[1]    (at.obdev.littlesnitchd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
21/11/09 22:05:43   Little Snitch UIAgent[10050]    2.0.4.385: m65968c1c
21/11/09 22:05:43   Little Snitch UIAgent[10050]    2.0.4.385: m579328b9
21/11/09 22:05:43   Little Snitch UIAgent[10050]    2.0.4.385: m41531ded
21/11/09 22:05:43   com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[170]  (at.obdev.LittleSnitchUIAgent) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Spotlight searches for ‘little snitch’ or ‘littlesnitch’ yield no results. Yet, it seems like I didn’t get rid of Little Snitch entirely, since it’s still using up my CPU.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Have you tried downloading Little Snitch again and running the Uninstaller?

Little Snitch 2.2

Answer 2

Have a look in the following locations for plist files that look like they are related to Little Snitch. They will most likely start with at.obdev :

/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchAgents
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons
~/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/LaunchDaemons

Move the offending files to a different location, reboot and see if it fixed things.

Be very careful, especially with the /System locations, because if you remove the wrong file, it could harm your system.

Answer 3

There's no need to edit any files; just unload the service and delete its plist:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/at.obdev.littlesnitchd.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/at.obdev.littlesnitchd.plist

Answer 4

You need open terminal:

cd /private/var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd

make a backup copy of overrides.plist (make sure it is there using the ls command)

sudo cp overrides.plist overrides.bak 

open overrides.plist

sudo vim overrides.plist

Look for any Little Snitch UIAgent entries and remove them. Save. Close. Reboot. (this should also remedy the peruser entries too)

Check Console if there are any entries.

Answer 5

If you don't want to manually mess around with launchd, Lingon is a a graphical editor for it. Unfortunately, development of it has ceased, but it still works fine, and it's open source.

Answer 6

I needed to remove Little Snitch from a system that wouldn't boot (hence, couldn't use the uninstaller) and accomplished it by logging in to Single User Mode (hold down Cmd+S) then mounting the drive and running commands from a script posted at apple.stackexchange.com/questions/56481/remove-little-snitch-via-script

Danger! my system had no data - you could mess yours up!

#Kill Little Snitch Processes
killall $NetworkMonitor
killall $UIAgent

rm -R /Library/Application\ Support/Objective\ Development/
rm -R /Library/LaunchAgents/at.obdev.LittleSnitchNetworkMonitor.plist
rm -R /Library/LaunchAgents/at.obdev.LittleSnitchUIAgent.plist
rm -R /Library/LaunchDaemons/at.obdev.littlesnitchd.plist
rm -R /Library/Little\ Snitch/*
rm -R /Library/Logs/LittleSnitchDaemon.log
rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/LittleSnitch.kext
rm -R "/Applications/Little Snitch Configuration.app"

Worked for me...

I found that using launctl alone wasn't enough - I guess the kext was still loaded, because I'd see LS(4050) Little Snitch Start in the verbose startup messages after I'd unloaded and rm'd all my /Library/LaunchDaemon/ scripts