what port(s) give me good control over processes (list, kill, etc) better than MacOS pgrep+pkill

[Richard L. Hamilton]

Not seeing that, if this fits your scenario:

sh-3.2$ open -a TextEdit
sh-3.2$ pgrep -lf TextEdit
68476 /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
sh-3.2$ pkill TextEdit
# it went away...

SIGTERM is (usually) like Quit; SIGKILL is like Force Quit.

A process may ignore SIGTERM; the signalling process will not be informed of that. SIGKILL cannot be ignored; although in some Unix implementations, a hang on what's supposed to be fast I/O (like a physical disk, or an NFS mount that's "hard" but not "intr") can make a process unkillable, at least until the hang resolves, if it does; if not, nothing but a reboot will kill such a process. Some implementations block SIGKILL on process 1, because process 1 is essential and there's no good reason to do that.

Sometimes the executable in an app bundle does not have the same name as the app; but a pgrep -lf could match based on the full path includng the app name.

pgrep or pkill not finding something is not an error, although they'll have a return code of one.
sh-3.2$ pgrep -lf nosuch
sh-3.2$ echo $?
1
sh-3.2$ pkill nosuch
sh-3.2$ echo $?
1

You cannot kill something unless you're root or the same real or effective userid as it is; there MIGHT be other restrictions, Apple liking to be tricky about security. But if it exists and you're not allowed to kill it, that would get an error message:

sh-3.2$ pkill syslogd
pkill: signalling pid 161: Operation not permitted

Other than those cases, I don't have further guesses what's happening.


> On Apr 7, 2023, at 23:55, Kenneth Wolcott <kennethwolcott at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Richard;
> 
>  Thanks for the info.  I'll look into those.
> 
>  I found that a process that I started by using the MacOS open
> command could be listed by prep but I could not kill it with pkill
> (silently fails, like a no-op).
> 
sh-3.2$ 

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