Hi Richard; Thank you for your additional input.
Apparently I was over-thinking pgrep+pkill in my earlier attempts. I have implemented your suggestions in my script and it appears to work fine. Thanks, Ken Wolcott On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 9:27 PM Richard L. Hamilton <rlha...@smart.net> wrote: > > Not seeing that, if this fits your scenario: > > sh-3.2$ open -a TextEdit > sh-3.2$ pgrep -lf TextEdit > 68476 /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit > sh-3.2$ pkill TextEdit > # it went away... > > SIGTERM is (usually) like Quit; SIGKILL is like Force Quit. > > A process may ignore SIGTERM; the signalling process will not be informed of > that. SIGKILL cannot be ignored; although in some Unix implementations, a > hang on what's supposed to be fast I/O (like a physical disk, or an NFS mount > that's "hard" but not "intr") can make a process unkillable, at least until > the hang resolves, if it does; if not, nothing but a reboot will kill such a > process. Some implementations block SIGKILL on process 1, because process 1 > is essential and there's no good reason to do that. > > Sometimes the executable in an app bundle does not have the same name as the > app; but a pgrep -lf could match based on the full path includng the app name. > > pgrep or pkill not finding something is not an error, although they'll have a > return code of one. > sh-3.2$ pgrep -lf nosuch > sh-3.2$ echo $? > 1 > sh-3.2$ pkill nosuch > sh-3.2$ echo $? > 1 > > You cannot kill something unless you're root or the same real or effective > userid as it is; there MIGHT be other restrictions, Apple liking to be tricky > about security. But if it exists and you're not allowed to kill it, that > would get an error message: > > sh-3.2$ pkill syslogd > pkill: signalling pid 161: Operation not permitted > > Other than those cases, I don't have further guesses what's happening. > > > On Apr 7, 2023, at 23:55, Kenneth Wolcott <kennethwolc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Richard; > > Thanks for the info. I'll look into those. > > I found that a process that I started by using the MacOS open > command could be listed by prep but I could not kill it with pkill > (silently fails, like a no-op). > > sh-3.2$ >
