I have an application with 2 components: a desktop application that users interact with, and a background process that can be enabled from the desktop application. Once the background process is enabled, it will run as a user launch agent independently of the desktop app. However, what I'm wondering is what to do when the user disables the background process. At this point I want to stop the background process but I'm not sure what the best approach is. The 3 options that I see are: Use the 'kill' command. Direct, but not reliable and just seems somewhat "wrong". Use an NSMachPort to send an exit request from the desktop app to the background process. This is the best approach I've thought of but I've run into an implementation problem (I'll be posting this in a separate query) and I'd like to be sure that the approach is right before going much further. Something else??? Thank you in advance for any help/insight that you can offer.