[Diggory Laycock]

Hi,

I have a bit of software, which acts as my answering machine on one of my macs.

However, there is a bug in it which causes it to go unresponsive at certain times.

The weird thing is that once this happens, the app cannot be force-quit!

Force-quitting through the GUI fails silently, and trying to quit it through the shell fares no better:

Code:
Last login: Tue Feb 15 15:26:42 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Widebook:~ diggory$ ssh monkeyserver
Last login: Tue Feb 15 14:54:34 2005
Welcome to Darwin!
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ ps -ax | grep "Phlink"
  602  ??   E     0:00.00 (Ovolab Phlink)
  603  ??  S      0:00.62 /Users/diggory/Applications/Ovolab Phlink.app/Contents/Resources/PhlinkHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/PhlinkHe
20317 std  S+     0:00.01 grep Phlink
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ kill 602
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ ps -ax | grep "Phlink"
  602  ??   E     0:00.00 (Ovolab Phlink)
  603  ??  S      0:00.62 /Users/diggory/Applications/Ovolab Phlink.app/Contents/Resources/PhlinkHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/PhlinkHe
20319 std  S+     0:00.01 grep Phlink
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ kill -9 602
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ ps -ax | grep "Phlink"
  602  ??   E     0:00.00 (Ovolab Phlink)
  603  ??  S      0:00.62 /Users/diggory/Applications/Ovolab Phlink.app/Contents/Resources/PhlinkHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/PhlinkHe
20323 std  R+     0:00.00 grep Phlink
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ sudo kill 602
Password:
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$ ps -ax | grep "Phlink"
  602  ??   E     0:00.00 (Ovolab Phlink)
  603  ??  S      0:00.62 /Users/diggory/Applications/Ovolab Phlink.app/Contents/Resources/PhlinkHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/PhlinkHe
20326 std  S+     0:00.01 grep Phlink
MonkeyServer:~ diggory$

This means I cannot log-out - or restart, and am forced to hard-reset (not good.)

Any ideas how to kill the process?

[Millennium]

Try using the -9 option on kill. The result, assuming the offending app has a PID of 602 (as in your example), would look like:

Code:
sudo kill -9 602

-9 is The Big Guns, and not something you want to use unless you absolutely have to, because it can have unpredictable effects depending on the app you are killing, and mis-typing the PID so that you kill the wrong app can be disastrous depending on what it is. But the app that you use this on will go down.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by Diggory Laycock:
This means I cannot log-out - or restart, and am forced to hard-reset (not good.)
Any ideas how to kill the process?

Other than what Millenium said, I dunno how to kill the process, but instead of hard-reset, try "sudo shutdown -r now"

-t

[Diggory Laycock]

sudo kill -9 had no effect.

Argh! Unstoppable!

The sudo shutdown command worked well though - nice clean restart.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by Diggory Laycock:
sudo kill -9 had no effect.
Argh! Unstoppable!
The sudo shutdown command worked well though - nice clean restart.

There you go, killed the bastard after all

-t

[Dog Like Nature]

Next time it happens, do an lsof -p <pid> and post it.