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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
Old 07-13-2014
Moderator's Comments:
Mod Comment 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.
This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun For This Post:
 

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kill(2) 							System Calls Manual							   kill(2)

Name
       kill - send signal to a process

Syntax
       #include <sys/types.h>
       #include <signal.h>

       kill(pid, sig)
       pid_t pid;
       int sig;

Description
       The  system  call sends the signal sig to a process specified by the process number pid.  The sig can be a signal specified in a call or it
       can be 0.  If the sig is 0, error checking is performed, but a signal is not sent.  This call can be used to check the validity of pid.

       The sending and receiving processes must have the same effective user ID, otherwise this call is  restricted  to  the  superuser  with  the
       exception of the signal SIGCONT.  The signal SIGCONT can always be sent to a child or grandchild of the current process.

       If the process number is 0, the signal is sent to all other processes in the sender's process group.

       If  the process number is negative but not -1, the signal is sent to all processes whose process-group-id is equal to the absolute value of
       the process number.

       The above two options are variants of

       If the process number is -1, and the user is the superuser, the signal is broadcast for all processes except to system  processes  and  the
       process sending the signal.

       Processes may send signals to themselves.

Environment
       System Five
       POSIX

       When  your  program  is	compiled in the System V or POSIX environment, a signal is sent if either the real or effective uid of the sending
       process matches the real or saved-set-uid (as described in ) of the receiving process. In addition, any process can use a pid  of  -1,  and
       the signal is sent to all processes subject to these permission checks.

       In POSIX mode, the pid argument is of type pid_t.

Return Values
       Upon successful completion, a value of 0 is returned.  Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned, and is set to indicate the error.

Diagnostics
       The system call fails under the following conditions:

       [EINVAL]       The sig is not a valid signal number.

       [EPERM]	      The  sending  process  is not the superuser, and its effective user ID does not match the effective user ID of the receiving
		      process.

       [ESRCH]	      No process can be found corresponding to that specified by pid.

See Also
       execve(2), getpgrp(2), getpid(2), killpg(2), sigvec(2), pause(3)

																	   kill(2)
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