Disable reportcrash osx using launchctl – disable crash popups

Disable reportcrash osx. This post will show you how to disable the dialog box that appears when a program crashes in osx. Doing this will stop your system crawling when something crashes!

How to disable reportcrash osx

launchtl can disable and re-enable crash reporting. To disable crash reporting:


launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ReportCrash.plist
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ReportCrash.Root.plist

To re-enable crash reporting:


launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ReportCrash.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ReportCrash.Root.plist

ReportCrash has a man page built in to your mac. You can get lots of information from the man page.

  • open spotlight – cmd + space,
  • type terminal, press enter,
  • then type in ‘man ReportCrash’ – its case-sensitive

Disable reportcrash osx using launchctl

Sources: Man page for ReportCrash

ReportCrash analyzes crashing processes and saves a crash report to disk. A crash report contains information that can help a developer diagnose the cause of a crash. ReportCrash also records the identity of the crashing process and the location of the saved crash report in the system.log and the ASL log database.

This Post Has 9 Comments

  1. Omakayd

    I’ve recently been having problems with “reportcrash” taking up a lot of resources, even when an app hasn’t crashed. This has stopped that from happening.

    Thank you.

  2. Kirill Stytsenko

    thanks! helped me, same as it helped the other users. :)

  3. Laucha

    Great tip! same as the others, this process just take a lot of resources without any cause or reason (at sight…). Many thanks!

  4. Devin

    thank you!!! whenever i go into activity moniter it always says report crash is taking up lots of cpu and this fixes my problem

  5. Jason Potvin

    would I type this into terminal? I am sorry I am not a programmer.

  6. Dom Millar

    This is an excellent fix. Has stopped my MacBook from constantly overheating. Thanks so much.

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