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

[Kenneth Wolcott]

Hi Richard;

  Thank you for your additional input.

  Apparently I was over-thinking pgrep+pkill in my earlier attempts.

  I have implemented your suggestions in my script and it appears to work fine.

Thanks,
Ken Wolcott

On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 9:27 PM Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:
>
> 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$
>