OS X (Apple)

Hi all,

VLC goes all SWOD on me today, so naturally I try to force quit the process.

Nothing.

Drop into Terminal and run ps ax | grep vlc,
noting that kill has no effect, nor killall. The PID is hopping up!
W
T
F?

MADDENING! Killall was made for this right? Killall says no such process or some bs. Computers effing suck sometimes.

Does anyone know why a PID is hopping up by increments of 3, and occasionally 3? It isn't a virus but it sure acts like one, whatever this cause. But most impotantly:
How can I kill an unkillable process? Is there any other command I can use? Maybe NUKEEFFINGPS or something? Makes me wanna throw my MBP out the freekin window it does.

If the PID is increasing, then the new process was spawned. Something started new VLC process. Check parent ID of that process and see what started it.

Moderator's Comments:

aaronbsdf: Please watch your language. This is a professional site and we expect language appropriate in a professional context.

To expand on what bartus11 said, kill and killall are designed to send a signal to one or more running processes. They are failing for you because the processes you're trying to kill are already gone when you are trying to kill them.

It sounds like your VLC processes are starting and dying very quickly and whatever parent process started them sees that they failed and is restarting them in an endless loop. You need to kill the process that is starting them AND THEN you need to find out why they are dying instead of doing whatever they are supposed to do.

If you use ps -fax (instead of ps -ax), you'll see a column with the header PPID. That column shows the parent process ID of the process identified by that line. If the PIDs are going up by 3 on each cycle, you may have a case where you have a parent, child, and grandchild. If that is the case, you'll need to find the PPID of the PPID.

However, if the PPID is 1; do not try to kill that PID. It means that the parent of your VLC process died after starting the VLC process. You need to find the intermediate process that started your VLC process before it dies and then find its parent.