MacOS – how to kill process in Mac OS X and not have it restart on its own

killlaunchdmacosservicesterminal

When I run sudo kill -9 [PID] with the proper process ID, the process stops but then is restarted and has a new PID. I'm trying to kill the mysqld process.

How can I mimic the Activity Monitor in killing a process? In the Activity Monitor, when you press "Quit Process", the process permanently stops running, it is totally terminated. I figure that kill will do the same thing right?

I had both the Activity Monitor and the terminal next to each other to see if the command works, but every time I do sudo kill -9 [PID], the process in Activity monitor doesn't go away, it just refreshes with a new PID.

So… how do I kill the mysqld process via the terminal?

Best Answer

The process you are killing is probably being managed by launchd, the proper way to stop it and have it not restart is to use launchctl unload <path to plist>. The plist that controls that process is in either /Library/LaunchDaemons or /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. If it is a system process and not one of your own, then you will probably have to use sudo to get launchctl to work as desired.

A better way try and stop it might be;

${MYSQL_HOME}/bin/mysqladmin -u root -proot shutdown > /dev/null 2>&1
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