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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Something I really loathe about OS X, and it has been becoming worse with time, is the amount of "processes" or whatever that suddenly take 100% CPU. There's no place to find out what they are.

What are they doing, are they from apple or not? You're hopeless, aside from some comments here and there from random members of the community.

To this day, I have no idea what 'powerd' is, for instance.

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> To this day, I have no idea what 'powerd' is, for instance.

You're in luck, there's an extremely helpful and well written man page on exactly that subject. I will quote in its entirety:

"NAME

     powerd -- Daemon that manages Energy Preferences.

SYNOPSIS

     powerd is a launchd managed daemon.

DESCRIPTION

     powerd is a launchd managed daemon."

Haha, amazing.

Besides the man page, the places to look are "spindump -stdout" and "log stream".

And you couldn't be bothered to do a cursory search?

> There's no place to find out what they are.

Google worked fine for me. YMMV.

Could you please, then, point me to a creditable source regarding what 'powerd' is?

No, I couldn't be bothered either.

You can use the 'man' command in Terminal to pull up the man page (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page) for 'powerd' (that is, by typing 'man powerd'). By doing so, you'll see that it is a "launchd managed daemon" that "manages Energy Preferences."

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