Minecraft wiki entry for Create_a_Mac_OS_X_startup_daemon, associated text: The command itself should never return, that's all right, but the server should properly start without any error messages, and you should see the java environment being started. You can do control-c to terminate the server. Although it seems inviting, you cannot really run any commands from that console, as stdin was redirected from a file, But if you wish, you can start a 2nd terminal and issue commands like sudo echo save-all >> /Users/_minecraft/stdin.commandlist and they should execute.