Rogue process won't quit

cybergoober

Neomaxizoomdweebie
Tried to open a screenshot in Preview and it hung. So I hit CMD + OPT + ESC and force-quit Preview. Tried to open it again and it hung again. Tried to force-quit and now it won't die. I've tried with Process Viewer. Won't die. Even tried in the Terminal (sudo and regular) kill -9 10315 (10315 is the process ID as far as I can tell). I am using the proper command and syntax, right?

I'm really trying to avoid having to hit the manual reset button. It's not that I'm going for some kind of personal uptime record or anything, it's just that we're not supposed to have to do that any more. This will be just my third time having to hit the reset button (first two were kernel panics) since loading 10.0 last March.

Any suggestions, or should I just bite the bullet and hit the reset button :( ?

TIA
Steve
 
Well, I really can't say much about a process not responding to kill -9 unless it's in the clutches of a debugger... However, to avoid a hard reset, always try entering 'sudo reboot' in a terminal or over an SSH connection to flush the filesystem cache and attempt graceful termination of every process.
 
Thanks. That worked. Still have much to learn on the UNIX side. Didn't think it was going to work at first. I got the little spinning gears over the Finder instead of the blue screen. After about two minutes it finally restarted.

Thanks again.
 
Umm.. maybe I missed something, but why didn't you just go to Reboot from the Apple menu? I have had Zombie processes quite a few times, and when nothing else worked, I could still reboot from the GUI, as well as the CLI.
 
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2:09AM up 58 days, 2 users, load averages: 1.24, 1.35, 1.43

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