What does the process 'Locum' do?

Question

I am seeing a process titled, 'Locum' show up in my OS X process list. Does anyone know the details of what this process does?

Solution 1

Google says that it's a helper process for Finder, that does all the stuff Finder would need escalated privileges for.

Solution 2

In addition to what's said, if you choose to "Secure Empty Trash..." in Finder, Locum will consume a lot of resources because it will re-write the data (possibly several times) of where your trashed items resided. This will ensure you can never ever recover them.

Comments

[Admin]

If you see that is using a large amount of resources, you are probably emptying your trash or the trash is being emptied in the background; it can also eat CPU if you have a large number of "preview" windows opened.

[Læti]

Locum also appears when copying old Time Machine data sets from one drive to another. The finder needs escalated privileges to be able to copy everything that's inside the backups.

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

@user117090 — What would the process Locum have to do with "preview" windows ?

[Madison S]

Yup, Locum is used for privilege escalation: discussions.info.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8293436

[Jeff Burdges]

And you should always kill Locum whenever you kill Finder while doing anything privileged because it'll keep hogging resources for whatever Finder was doing.