process won't die

thuh freakthuh freak
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
okay, i have OS X 10.1.5 on a b&w g3 with 192 MB RAM. I have this issue with my sound stix that every so often they konk out, so recently i tried to un/re-plug them. I got them working, but before trying that I had gone to Sound in the System Preferences. It hung. System Preferences just sits there, attempting to open Sound. I can't force quit it (tried more than 10 times). I can't kill it from the command line (tried `kill`, and `kill -1` to `kill -15`, with the appropriate pid). The process is still there, and it still wont close. I was able to open an extra System Preference process (by terminal'ing in, and executing the binary). From there I accessed the Sound panel (as well as others) in an attempt to shake the old SysPrefs loose. no dice.



any1 got any ideas of how to kill the SysPrefs? I'd really like to do it w/o restarting.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Have you tried:



    "kill -KILL" or perhaps the ProcessViewer? (in the Utilities folder)
  • Reply 2 of 8
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    i just tried kill -KILL and the proc viewer's quit and force-quit a proc. neither worked. any1 got any other ideas?



    edit: ok, i just noticed (pretty sure its associated witht eh damn SysPrefs) that my keyboard volume up/down/mute btns dont work.



    [ 07-03-2002: Message edited by: thuh Freak ]</p>
  • Reply 3 of 8
    pastapasta Posts: 112member
    [quote]Originally posted by thuh Freak:

    <strong>i just tried kill -KILL and the proc viewer's quit and force-quit a proc. neither worked. any1 got any other ideas?



    edit: ok, i just noticed (pretty sure its associated witht eh damn SysPrefs) that my keyboard volume up/down/mute btns dont work.



    [ 07-03-2002: Message edited by: thuh Freak ]</strong><hr></blockquote>



    have you tried rebooting?

  • Reply 4 of 8
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    Open up the terminal, type



    ps auxwww | awk '{print $2,$12}'



    Now you have PID number in the first field and the process name in the second. To kill it type,



    kill &lt;PID #&gt;



    that's it......
  • Reply 5 of 8
    snofsnof Posts: 98member
    [quote]Originally posted by Relic:

    <strong>Open up the terminal, type



    ps auxwww | awk '{print $2,$12}'



    Now you have PID number in the first field and the process name in the second. To kill it type,



    kill &lt;PID #&gt;



    that's it......</strong><hr></blockquote>



    If you actually read the original post you might have noticed that he already tried to kill it through the Terminal, it didn't work.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    I just had a new idea...



    Open ProcessViewer and find the process in question. Note what the "parent process ID" is. Is it the Window Manager? If not, then you've got another process somewhere that's recreating it each time you kill it. I've had this happen to me before, namely at times when OmniWeb has crashed. Kill the parent process, then kill the child. That should kill it for good.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    well, i thought i'd put some closure to this, for whoever cares. after trying a bunch of things in proc viewer, i decided to `kill` some of the processes i found in `top`. i don't remember which one did it, but `kill`ing one of them froze the comp, so i restarted. ruined my uptime streak.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    well, if you had "sudo kill"ed the window manager, it would have killed all user process and dumped you back to the login screen. You should have tried that before randomly killing off processes you don't understand -- that's a guaranteed way to nuke your computer.
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