MacOS – Which process knows what applications are open

macos

I'm trying to find the process that takes care of what applications are open. For example, an app I closed stills shows as open in Dock and Force Quit, so I want to kill/restart that process (which takes care of what processes are open). Logging out would solve it too, but I can't right now. Restarting Dock does not work.

For example, I'm 100% sure I have killed Safari, using kill -9, but it still shows up in the Dock and in Force Quit. The process is definitely killed, but the Dock and Force Quit haven't got that, because the process that lists which applications are open have frozen. I want to know the name of that process.

Best Answer

The process which keeps track of all processes is launchd (PID 1) which is the first process launched when the OS starts. There is no standard way of killing it (technically speaking sending the TERM or KILL signal will not kill it), if you could it would immediately lead to a reboot.

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MacOS – How to kill a process that won’t die

killall kills by process name (which is definitively not 77439 and most probably also not Mathematica). You can use kill 77439 or (if this fails) kill -9 77439 instead (but if the process is really stuck, only a reboot will solve the problem).

Also, due the the way sending/processing of signals (like kill -9) works in Unix/OS X, there are situations where a process will be unkillable. One typical example for this is if a process gets stuck while accessing some external device and never actually gets control back. In such situations a reboot is the only way to get rid of the process.

MacOS – Easiest way to gently kill an intermittently unresponsive application

You should be able to use AppleScript:

tell application "name" to quit

Using 'to quit' rather than 'to force quit' will mean that it won't be forced regardless of whether the app is unresponsive—rather, it will ask the app to quit whenever it can.

With shell:

osascript -e 'tell application "name" to quit'

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to kill a process that won’t die

MacOS – Easiest way to gently kill an intermittently unresponsive application

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