Kill reappearing processes

Question

I'm making a shell script to kill applications; however I can't kill applications like Xcode that have multiple processes because when I kill the processes already running, new ones appear to take their place, maybe there's a parent process that call the other ones or something, is there a workaround for this?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 10 '12 at 19:35

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ps -o ppid -p <childpid> will report the PPID column (parent PID)

Pipe the result to tail -1 to capture the result:

$ ps -o ppid 12345 | tail -1

answered Sep 10 '12 at 19:35

a.drew.b

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The problem with my particular case is that one of the parents is the launchd process, killing all other processes produce a re-apparition of some of them – jonathanwiesel Sep 10 '12 at 23:46

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '12 at 19:56

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Try killing the whole process group:

 kill -9 -<pid>

Note "-" before pid

answered Sep 10 '12 at 19:56

dimba

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it indeed kills the process but it reappear with a new PID – jonathanwiesel Sep 10 '12 at 23:46

Kill reappearing processes

2 Answers2