Voodoo "????" Process

[Malachite]

What are these voodoo "????" processes which seem to come and go as seen in the process viewer?

[michaelsanford]

Do you see the same processes in the terminal using "top"? Are you running Jaguar or Puma (10.2 or 10.1)?

[Malachite]

Interestingly no I don't see these mysterious "????" processes in a terminal window when running "top". I keep both the process viewer window and the terminal open side by side to monitor their respective activity. I'm running Jaguar 10.2.3 btw...

Thanks for your assistance.

[JonasMW]

I'm running 10.2.3 and I get processes running under user ??? at random... incidentally one of them was once using 216% of my cpu power...

[michaelsanford]

I'm *guessing* that perhaps they're daemons like SystemIServer or automount or something they'd rather people not mess with. But again, that's just a guess.

I presume you CAN see a PID? Check for the PID and see if the same PID appears in top, then you can see what's being hidden.

top -l5 > topout.txt

That command (that's a -Lfive not a fifteen) will output a log of TOP to a file 5 times, refreshed every 1 second, so you don't have to watch both top and pv furiously. Then you can use cat topout.txt | grep "xxx" replacing xxx with the PID you noticed in processviewer to find out which process is hidden.

[Malachite]

I appreciate your detailed reply. I reviewed the man page for top and did what you recommended. I actually wrote out 60 iterations (once per second) of top over a minute and then watched the PV window. Strange thing is that although these processes with user = "???" and garbled text for names kept coming and going from the PV window, the top outputs never showed any additional processes. Moreover, the processes would come and go so fast as to not make it possible to catch their PIDs in the PV window.

Hmm... not sure what to make of this. I'll keep experimenting and report again if I find something. Thanks.

[koim]

I’m having the same here. Anybody has a clue what this is? I’ve been worried sick that it’s a virus or something. (I ran the public beta of Symantec Antivirus 9, and it found a viros on some OS 9 files, I believe it was SevenDust A/B)

Help anyone?

[Captain Code]

I've had those show up too, but they only appear in ProcessViewer. They don't seem to have a PID, maybe becasue they don't show up long enough for PV to find it.