Did iTunes ever launch without you opening the app?

Use overkill to instantly kill iTunes once it opened itself, so your workflow isn't interrupted.

Reasons why iTunes launches:

• You connect an iPhone or iPad to your Mac
• You click play/pause while listening to a web-based music player (e.g. SoundCloud)
• You launch iTunes by clicking on the icon by mistake
• Someone sent you a link to an iOS app
• You click on a link on the web, and didn't expect it to be an Music link
• You updated iTunes
• You open a file in Finder, and forgot to change the default app to VLC

Another nice benefit of this is that you don't have to manually close iTunes when you update your Xcode installation.

I first tweeted about this idea over a year ago.

Many of iTunes' popups require you to click them away, unless you want to manually force quit iTunes.

iTunes usually launches as soon as you plugin your iPhone. With overkill running, the iTunes process is killed immediately, so your workflow isn't interrupted.

ruby overkill.rb

To launch process in the background use

ruby overkill.rb &

Although this tool works perfectly fine, the repo is meant as a joke. The script uses polling to monitor the active processes. The script is in no way meant to be a serious application.