How to toggle LaunchAgents ON or OFF

Simple answer (using Terminal)

ON:

sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/nameofprocess.plist.off /Library/LaunchAgents/nameofprocess.plist

OFF:

sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/nameofprocess.plist /Library/LaunchAgents/nameofprocess.plist.off
 

In depth answer

You can see an agent running in Application Monitor but sometimes it's easier to both see and quit these processes using Terminal.
First, to see what is running type
 
launchctl list
 
...and then just scroll up the list to see the running processes. Alternatively, to save you having to scroll through a large list, if you know part of the name of the full process you can selectively list only processes with that in the name (obviously changing nameofprocess for the one you're looking for):

launchctl list |grep nameofprocess

Once you've found the process, you can disable it with

sudo launchctl remove full.process.name -w

Replace the complete filename (usually 3 parts separated by dots) into full.process.name and add the -w flag, which writes this request to disc thus preventing it from relaunching on a subsequent boot.
Alternatively you could type in the full path of the process like this (for example stopping the virus-like facebook-data-sharing plugin from launching from NTFS For Mac)

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.paragon-software.facebook.agent.plist

You may also wish to disable an agent or simply reduce it's launch window....for instance telling Chrome's updater to disarm

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

...or maybe only check for updates once a week so that it's not running in the background all the time...

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 604800

Finally reboot the mac to have the changes take effect.


To reload an agent simply type this

launchctl load com.exampleservice.toload Map