MacOS – Unable to force quit Chrome (Yosemite) OS X 10.10.4

This may not answer your question directly, but it is a solution....

I am not a fan of doing dev work on my production Mac. I also don't see any value in setting up a MAMP server because it will be a very rare occurrence that you get a hosting provider with MAMP setup. Chances are it will be LAMP and by a very small margin, WAMP.

Why not set up a LAMP box with CentOS in a virtual machine. VirtualBox would be a good choice for this. The beauty with this is that when your Mac goes to sleep, it automatically puts the VM into a saved state - meaning when wakes, it is right where it left off.

The other huge benefit is that you can move that VM to other machines where as your MAMP setup, you are pretty much bound to your hardware.

Just a thought....

Good to hear that the shutdown worked. Remember to precede it immediately with a 'sync', executed as the root user or via the sudo analogue, to flush the hard drive caches to disk from volatile memory.

If you desire to investigate deeper, in hopes of learning what is going on ( I hope you seek more info... ), then please do the following:

 1.  Open Terminal, and then open two, distinct windows.  


 2.  In one window only, type:  

     sudo dtruss -afloe -n VLC > ~/Desktop/tracevlc.txt 2>&1

 3.  In the other window, type:

     open /Applications/VLC.app

 4.  Attempt to reproduce the original problem.  If you need to shutdown, do so.  

 5.  When the machine reboots, read the tracevlc.txt on your Desktop -- it might well provide a clearer understanding of what is happening...  

Hope that this helps! Let me know if you find anything of interest...

F.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-= my previous response follows: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=

Do you get anything from executing as your login-user (non-root) the following in a Terminal:

launchctl list | grep -i vlc

or

sudo pgrep -f -l -i vlc

Try this:

1. obtain a root shell via:

   sudo -s
   

2. Sync drive buffers to hardware:

   sync
   

3. Attempt to terminate vlc by various means:

   pkill -KILL -f -i -l vlc
   
   killall -9 -z vlc 
   
   killall -9 -z VLC.app
   

4. Attempt to tear down user-space, terminate all userspace apps, shutdown system services, and reboot. If you are running a recent version of OS X, then this works best:

   launchctl reboot system
   

Otherwise, do this:

    shutdown -r now