Author: Justin Pot / Source: howtogeek.com
You’re browsing Activity Monitor when you notice something named cfprefsd. What is this, and should you be worried about it?
Quick answer: No, cfpresfd is a core part of macOS, and you couldn’t use your computer without it.
This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Activity Monitor, like kernel_task, hidd, mdsworker, installd, WindowServer, blued, launchd, backup, opendirectoryd, powerd, coreauthd, configd, mdnsresponder, UserEventAgent, nsurlstoraged, commerce, parentalcontrold, sandboxd, cloudd, and many others. Don’t know what those services are?
Better start reading!Today’s process, cfprefsd, is a daemon, which means it runs in the background and handles system tasks. You can generally identify daemons by the “d” at the end. This specific daemon allows macOS and your applications to read and write preferences files.
What cfprefsd Does
To quote the man page, which you can view by typing man cfprefsd in Terminal:
cfprefsd provides preferences services for the CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults APIs.
That’s a little confusing if you don’t know what CF Preferences and NSUserDefaults are, so let’s dig into those briefly.
The CF in CFPreferences stands for Core Foundation. According to Apple’s developer documentation, Core Foundation is how your Mac manages both system-wide and application-specific preferences:
Core Foundation provides a simple, standard…
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