How to kill a process that absolutely will not die, OSX terminal - macos

Trying to kill an 2 unwanted process left over by a tech company. They both have to do with remote support. One is in root and the other is in user. Nothing is working.
Let's say the PID is 8005, here's what I have tried in terminal:
kill 8005, kill -9 8005, kill -KILL 8005, sudo kill 8005, sudo kill -9 8005, pkill -p -9 8005, sudo pkill -P -9 8005
And so on. You get the point.
Every time I attempt to kill, it comes back with a new PID almost instantly. The parent is launchd or kernaltask.
The tech company's response is "we have no idea." Please help!

This sounds a lot like Launchd, Apple's launch daemon manager.
You may or may not be able to remove it with the following steps:
Locate the pid of the live process
Enter launchctl list | grep PID into terminal while replacing "PID" with the pid of the process. The PIDs will be listed on the left, if you find the culprit in the list, skip to step 4, if not, continue.
Enter sudo launchctl list | grep PID into terminal and replace "PID" with the pid of the process like you did in step 2, you will most likely find a different list of processes this time because now you are filtering through the root daemons.
If you did not find the process identifier in the list, then the process is not being managed by launchctl (so sorry) and the rest of this answer is pretty irrelevant. If you did, however, find the pid: Continue.
The process should have (on the right side) a name in the format of com.blah.blah or something similar. Make sure to remember this.
If you found the pid in step 2:
Go in Finder, Press CMD+Shift+G and type or paste in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and hit "Go" it will bring you to a folder and look around in that folder for a file named "com.blah.blah" aka the name of the service. If you find the file, head over to the last and final step (at the bottom)
If you found the pid in step 4:
Go in Finder, Press CMD+Shift+G and type or paste in /Library/LaunchDaemons and hit "Go" it will bring you to a folder and look around in that folder for a file named "com.blah.blah" aka the name of the service. If you find the file, head over to the last and final step (at the bottom)
Provided you did not find the daemon in the prev step, repeat the last step only going to /Library/LaunchAgents after pressing "CMD+Shift+G" in Finder.
The final step, the one that makes it real!
At this point, you found the launch agent or daemon, and you're ready to terminate it. When you delete the file, after double checking everything, make sure that either you empty your trash immediately after, or delete it by pressing "CMD+Option+Delete", the reason why we do this, is to make sure that the file is actually gone from the OS, not just moved to the .Trashes folder. Depending on the type of service it is, you may need admin privileges, and also you may need to restart your computer.
Cheers, and good luck!
Edit/PS:
If any of you readers feel compelled to edit this answer/make it more clear, be my guest! I'm still learning the ropes here on SO and am doing my best to help others ;)

I might have a solution. Backup all of your important files, then follow this tutorial to reset your Mac: Click here to learn how to reset your mac back to original settings/data. You will lose your data, but any installed programs will dissapear and you will be able to start over.

Related

Terminal - Close all terminal windows/processes

I have a couple cli-based scripts that run for some time.
I'd like another script to 'restart' those other scripts.
I've checked SO for answers, but the scenarios were not applicable enough to mine, as I'm trying to end Terminal processes using Terminal.
Process:
2 cli-based scripts are running (node, python, etc).
3rd script is run and decides whether or not to restart the other 2.
This can't quit Terminal, but has to end current processes.
3rd script then runs an executable that restarts everything.
Currently none of the terminal windows are named, and from reading the other posts, I can see that it may be helpful to do so.
I can mostly set this up, I just could not find a command that would end all other terminal processes and close them.
There are a couple of ways to do this. Most common is having a pidfile.
This file contains the process ID (pid) of the job you want to kill
later on. A simple way to create the pidfile is:
$ node server &
$ echo $! > /tmp/node.pidfile
$! contains the pid of the process that was most recently backgrounded.
Then later on, you kill it like so:
$ kill `cat /tmp/node.pidfile`
You would do similar for the python script.
The other less robust way is to do a killall for each process and assume you are not running similar node or python jobs.
Refer to
What is a .pid file and what does it contain? if you're not familiar with this.
The question headline is quite general, so is my reply
killall bash
or generically
killall processName
eg. killall chrome

How to Turn Off a Program Running from .bash_profile

I am working with a Raspberry Pi running linux, and have modified the .bash_profile file in order to a run a program I've made automatically upon login. This works great, but I was wondering how to turn the program off, since for ctrl+c I would need to be running the program in the terminal.
You can use Kill to terminate program by its process Id, Top command will list all the processes, You can also use Pkill, which will Terminate the process by its name.
-9 option forces process to shut down, so its very commonly used.
Example:
kill -9 "Process ID without Quotation marks"
pkill -9 "Name with Quotation marks (Case Sensitive)"
Check this.
I always use
pkill - f processname

Trying to exit Ruby processes

When I attempt to exit ruby processes, namely, specs, rails console, and binding.pry calls, there are two options: ctrl+c, ctrl+z, or if things are really stuck, open a separate tab and killall ruby. However, when I ctrl+c the first time, the terminal outputs Exiting... Interrupt again to exit immediately. but hangs permanently. If I ctrl+c again to force exit, it successfully exits. However, from that point on, I can no longer see what I'm typing into the shell. So if I type ls, the line will still appear blank, but if I hit enter, it will successfully execute the ls command.
When I ctrl+z, it manages to stop the process successfully. However, after doing this a few times, I wind up with a bunch of ruby processes running, which seem to block running new ruby processes. In this scenario, killall ruby does nothing (nor does any derivative such as looking up by pid). I have to open activity monitor (mac) and force quit each proc individually.
Any ideas how I managed to get myself into this/how to resolve it?
Killing all your Ruby instances is a shotgun approach; you might hit targets you didn't intend, so I suggest to avoid it.
When your shell doesn't show what you're typing any more you need to (blindly) enter reset to reset the terminal.
Ctrl+Z doesn't kill your process, it just get's suspended. You should get an output that tells you a job number, like:
[1] + 95295 suspended man reset
Here, 1 is the job number. You can then resume the command by typing fg %<jobnumber>, in this example fg %1. Or you can kill it with kill -9 %<jobnumber>, like kill -9 %1.

How to reconnect to accidentally disconnected ssh session WITHOUT screen or tmux

I know these kinds of questions have been asked for years, and the answer to them are often Screen or tmux.
I surely will use screen at beginning if I know I will leave the session for a long time, or the network is too bad to maintain a reliable connection.
The main problem is when I start some session and find it must last long later, or the connection just lost accidentally. In the later case, often when I start another session immediately, I can find the previous processes are not killed at that time, but I just have no way to reconnect to their terminal.
So I wonder if it is possible to prevent normal processes from killed even long time after accidentally disconnected SSH session. And the most important is I can reconnect to their terminals with out start them in Screen in advance.
If not, is is possible to move a already started bare ssh session into a new Screen session for later reconnect?
I don't believe it's possible without something like screen. Once your pseudo-TTY is lost I'm almost certain it can't be recovered from a different shell (at least not without some narly hacks).
As far as adding an existing process to a new screen I think that is possible. Try the instructions here:
http://monkeypatch.me/blog/move-a-running-process-to-a-new-screen-shell.html
The first thing to do is to suspend the process. In my case, Irssi can be suspended by typing Ctrl + Z.
Secondly, resume the process in background:
$ bg
Now, we will detach the process from its parent (the shell). So, when the parent process will be terminated, the child (Irssi) will be able to continue. For this, we use the disown builtin:
$ disown irssi
Launch a screen session:
$ screen
As we are in a screen session, we will retrieve the irssi process. To do so, we use the reptyr command which take a pid:
$ reptyr
To avoid the tedious pid research, we can use the pgrep command:
$ reptyr $(pgrep irssi)
Now the process is in a screen shell, we can safely detach our session and no longer worry about killing our X server or close our ssh connection.
You'll need reptyr for this.
OPTION 2:
I suspect you may be trying to solve the wrong problem. If your SSH connection is dropping, why not address that? You can set SSH to be incredibly tolerant of timeouts and disconnects by tweaking your connection settings.
On your client, in $HOME/.ssh/config add:
ServerAliveInterval 60
ServerAliveCountMax 5
Now your sessions won't timeout even if the server doesn't respond for 5 minutes.
Use ssh-tmux instead of tmux:
function ssh-tmux(){
if ! command -v autossh &> /dev/null; then echo "Install autossh"; fi
autossh -M 0 $* -t 'byobu || {echo "Install byobu-tmux on server..."} && bash'
}
I worked on a text file using nano and I got disconnected. After I logged in I saw the nano process from the previous session was still running, but I couldn't switch to that nano instance. So, I killed the nano process and then it created file named filename.save. Which had my changes from the first session.

How can you start a LaunchAgent for the first time without rebooting, when your code runs as a LaunchDaemon?

I have a LaunchDaemon. When it runs, it checks if SIMBL is installed. If SIMBL is not installed, it uses NSTask to run /usr/sbin/installer on the SIMBL.pkg.
SIMBL's postflight script then tries to run a launchctl load command to start SIMBL's LaunchAgent immediately:
sudo -u "$USER" -- /bin/launchctl load -F -S Aqua -D user "${LAUNCHD_PLIST}"
This fails, because my LaunchDaemon's NSTask environment doesn't have $USER set.
If I have my daemon detect the current user with the System Configuration framework and pass it to NSTask with setEnvironment, launchctl bugs out on me:
Bug: launchctl.c:2325 (23930):13: (dbfd = open(g_job_overrides_db_path, O_RDONLY | O_EXLOCK | O_CREAT, S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR)) != -1
I realize a daemon, by definition, should not operate in a user session. By the same token, Apple seems to recommend LaunchAgents as helper objects for LaunchDaemons, to do that user session work. Is there any way to get such an agent up and running immediately?
I have all the .plists in the right places (they start running after a reboot, the next time launchctl does its regular loading) so my first thought was to just tell launchctl to reload. But all the code to do that is commented out in launchctl.c:
// { "reload", reload_cmd, "Reload configuration files and/or directories" },
...
* In later versions of launchd, I hope to load everything in the first pass,
* then do the Bonjour magic on the jobs that need it, and reload them, but for now,
* I haven't thought through the various complexities of reloading jobs, and therefore
* launchd doesn't have reload support right now.
Oh how launchd drives me crazy....
To cut to the chase, after much study and experimentation, this is how I do it on 10.5+:
# If possible, tell launchd to start the LaunchAgent. This will fail on 10.4.
# $F[0] is the pid
# $F[1] is the username
# $F[2] is the first word of the command
ps -ww -A -opid,user,command | \
perl -nae 'if($F[2] =~ /\bloginwindow\b/) { system(
qq(launchctl bsexec $F[0] su $F[1] -c "launchctl load -w <your_plist>"))
}'
I have found no way to achieve this directly on 10.4. I cheat on 10.4 and just run the thing the LaunchAgent would have run, even though it has a GUI and you're not supposed to be able to do that (you can anyway in 10.4-10.6; you can't in 10.7). On 10.4, the LaunchAgent works correct after the next reboot.
The above code looks for loginwindow processes and uses bsexec to run commands in those contexts. Keep in mind that with Fast User Switching, there can be multiple contexts.
Some useful links:
Daemons and Services Programming Guide. You have to read it, but it won't actually answer any of the hard questions. But it will at least give you hints at where everything is located.
TN2083. This is a maddening document that raises as many questions as it answers, but is gospel and mandatory reading for anyone entering the abyss of launchd.
Starting/stopping a launchd agent for all users with GUI sessions. This has several other useful links and explanation.
IMO, launchd is one of the worst "great ideas" Apple has ever deployed. The idea is very useful, but the API is horrible.

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