MacOS – How to get rid of MacKeeper Helper on the mac’s activity monitor

There are actually two cfprefsd processes running. One is the daemon owned by root and the agent owned by the logged in user.

If you kill both then the agent will respawn, notice the missing daemon and get it respawned.

If you just kill the daemon it takes a while to respawn so you should be able to run the updater.

At the command line :-

ps ax | grep cfprefsd

which will list the two processes with the process ID in the left column -

7308   ??  S      0:00.05 /usr/sbin/cfprefsd agent
7365   ??  Ss     0:00.02 /usr/sbin/cfprefsd daemon

so then

sudo kill -9 7365 and enter your password when prompted.

or whatever the PID is and quickly run the updater.

Why Adobe thinks it needs to have this process out of the way is a question for another day but Adobe updaters are known for their quirks.

That other answer isn't good because you should not shut down your computer, and it is very unlikely that malware has anything to do with not being able to shut down an application. Do this

• Type sudo killall Google\ Chrome on the Terminal.

• If this does not work, do this:

  pgrep -x "Google Chrome"
  

  You will see a number, then type kill -9 numberhere where numberhere is the number that the pgrep command returned.

And to instatly delete the app, no matter if it is open or not, do:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app

Then type your password.

The reason you get a permission denied error is because you need root access do to this, just use sudo on the terminal for this.