How to kill a process in MacOS

Question

I tried kill -9 698 but the process did not die     ps -ef   grep chromium   502   698   811   0   0 01 24            0 07 28  Users lucius chromium src xcodebuild Debug Chromium app Contents MacOS Chromium   502   854   732   0   0 00 00 ttys001    0 00 00 grep chromium   kill -9 698     ps -ef   grep chromium   502   698   811   0   0 01 24            0 07 28  Users lucius chromium src xcodebuild Debug Chromium app Contents MacOS Chromium   502   854   732   0   0 00 00 ttys001    0 00 00 grep chromium

User · Answer

If kill -9 isn t working  then neither will killall  or even killall -9 which would be more  intense    Apparently the chromium process is stuck in a non-interruptible system call  i e   in the kernel  not in userland  -- didn t think MacOSX had any of those left  but I guess there s always one more -   If that process has a controlling terminal you can probably background it and kill it while backgrounded  otherwise  or if the intense killing doesn t work even once the process is bakcgrounded  I m out of ideas and I m thinking you might have to reboot -

User · Answer

Given the path to your program  I assume you re currently running this under Xcode  and are probably at a debug breakpoint  Processes cannot be killed in this state because of the underlying implementation of breakpoints   The first step would be to go to your Xcode process and stop debugging  If for some strange reason you have lost access to Xcode  perhaps Xcode has lost access to its gdb sub-process   then the solution is to kill the gdb process  More generally  the solution here is to kill the parent process  In your case this is PID 811  the third column    There is no need to use -9 in this case

User · Answer

I have experienced that if kill -9 PID doesn t work and you own the process  you can use kill -s kill PID which is kind of surprising as the man page says you can kill -signal number PID

User · Answer

Some cases you might want to kill all the process running in a specific port  For example  if I am running a node app on 3000 port and I want to kill that and start a new one  then I found this command useful    Find the process IDs running on TCP port 3000 and kill it  kill -9  lsof -i TCP 3000   awk   LISTEN  print  2

User · Answer

I just now searched for this as I m in a similar situation  and instead of kill -9 698 I tried sudo kill 428 where 428 was the pid of the process I m trying to kill  It worked cleanly for me  in the absence of the hyphen  -  character  I hope it helps

User · Answer

If you know the process name you can use   killall Dock   If you don t you can open Activity Monitor and find it

User · Answer

in the spotlight  search for Activity Monitor  You can force fully remove any application from here

User · Answer

If you re trying to kill -9 it  you have the correct PID  and nothing happens  then you don t have permissions to kill the process   Solution     sudo kill -9 PID     Okay  sure enough Mac OS X does give an error message for this case     kill -9 196 -bash  kill   196  - Operation not permitted   So  if you re not getting an error message  you somehow aren t getting the right PID

User · Answer

I recently faced similar issue where the atom editor will not close  Neither was responding  Kill   kill -9   force exit from Activity Monitor - didn t work  Finally had to restart my mac to close the app

[macos] How to kill a process in MacOS?

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