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In all my terminal sessions on OS X or macOS, if I type who, in addition to the expected users (all me in various windows) I also always see

_mbsetupuser console  ...

Just who is that, and what is he/she doing?

Al-Mothafar
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orome
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    I think it might be from the setup wizard that OSX runs when you update it. Does it disappear if you reboot? – rich Nov 08 '15 at 17:19
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    @rich: Yes. Ad it seems that doing so fixed [all kinds of really weird behavior](http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/215521/4395) that I was getting. – orome Nov 13 '15 at 13:01
  • My exact question too. – uchuugaka May 15 '16 at 04:19

1 Answers1

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As the name suggests, it is a process associated with setup, which, in this case is running as a result of the upgrade from 10.11.x to 10.[11|12].x+y or from 10.12.x to 10.12.x+y (and may also appear in upgrading from older versions to 10.11.x). This process does not appear after an update to 10.13.x.

Unfortunately, though the "About This Mac" dialog may say that your version is 10.[11|12].x+y, you are in fact effectively between versions, and will get all kinds of odd behavior (repeated requests to unlock the Keychain, connectivity problems, wifi issues, mail synchronization failures, process crashes, etc.) until you complete the installation process, which you should be able to accomplish with a reboot.

orome
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  • Thanks for your explanation. `_mbsetupuser` disappeared after a reroot. – leoflower Feb 01 '16 at 02:34
  • I wish it was documented or less visible. – uchuugaka May 15 '16 at 04:19
  • I got here after searching _mbsetupuser, but I have a related question that frightens me a bit: typing W in the terminal, I saw my user, _mbsetupuser and a Gio11 user that doesn't make any sense to me, it's not my user and searching the web for it doesn't show any result. Rebooting, both _mbsetupuser and Gio11 disappeared from the active users, but now I seriously want to know what/who Gio11 was... – cdf1982 Jun 04 '16 at 06:43
  • I should add that typing "last" in the Terminal doesn't show that Gio11, even though I remeber it looked like it was connected for a day. – cdf1982 Jun 04 '16 at 06:50
  • Wow, my Finder was lagging a lot (3-4 secs) because of this and I was wondering if it was a FileVault or some other issue (corrupted settings, cache, etc.). It turned out to be this thing. After a reboot Finder performs as expected. Too bad that macOS doesn't inform you about this... – sakisk Oct 10 '16 at 10:42