How to kill a process in MacOS?

Question

I tried kill -9 698 but the process did not die.

$ ps -ef | grep chromium
  502   698   811   0   0:01.24 ??         0:07.28 /Users/lucius/chromium/         


        

Answer 1

If kill -9 isn't working, then neither will killall (or even killall -9 which would be more "intense"). Apparently the chromium process is stuck in a non-interruptible system call (i.e., in the kernel, not in userland) -- didn't think MacOSX had any of those left, but I guess there's always one more:-(. If that process has a controlling terminal you can probably background it and kill it while backgrounded; otherwise (or if the intense killing doesn't work even once the process is bakcgrounded) I'm out of ideas and I'm thinking you might have to reboot:-(.