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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killall

killall(1M)															       killall(1M)

NAME

       killall - kill all active processes

SYNOPSIS

       [signal]

DESCRIPTION

       is a procedure used by to kill all active processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure.

       is chiefly used to terminate all processes with open files so that the mounted file systems are no longer busy and can be unmounted.  sends
       the specified signal to all user processes in the system, with the following exceptions:

	      the process;

	      all processes (including background processes) associated with the terminal from which was invoked;

	      any process, if owned by

	      any process, if owned by

	      any process;

	      any process;

	      any process.

       obtains its process information from and therefore may not be able to perfectly identify which processes to signal (see ps(1)).

       If no signal is specified, a default of (kill) is used.

       is invoked automatically by The use of is recommended over using by itself (see shutdown(1M)).

FILES

SEE ALSO

       fuser(1M), kill(1), ps(1), shutdown(1M), signal(5).

STANDARDS CONFORMANCE

																       killall(1M)