The Great Hopping Unkillable PID Post: 302909014

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Operating Systems OS X (Apple) The Great Hopping Unkillable PID Post 302909014 by Don Cragun on Sunday 13th of July 2014 03:11:45 PM

07-13-2014

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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.

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LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE

kill.d

kill.d(1m)							   USER COMMANDS							kill.d(1m)

NAME

       kill.d - snoop process signals as they occur. Uses DTrace.

SYNOPSIS

       kill.d

DESCRIPTION

       kill.d is a simple DTrace program to print details of process signals as they are sent, such as the PID source and destination, signal num-
       ber and result.

       This program can be used to determine which process is sending signals to which other process.

       Since this uses DTrace, only users with root privileges can run this command.

EXAMPLES

       Default output, print process signals as they are sent.
	      # kill.d

FIELDS

       FROM   source PID

       COMMAND
	      source command name

       TO     destination PID

       SIG    destination signal ("9" for a kill -9)

       RESULT result of signal (-1 is for failure)

DOCUMENTATION

       See the DTraceToolkit for further documentation under the Docs directory. The DTraceToolkit docs may include full worked examples with ver-
       bose descriptions explaining the output.

EXIT

       kill.d will run forever until Ctrl-C is hit.

AUTHOR

       Brendan Gregg [Sydney, Australia]

SEE ALSO

       dtrace(1M), truss(1)

version 0.90							   May 14, 2005 							kill.d(1m)