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/src/xcodebuild/Debug/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium   502   854   732   0   0:00.00 ttys001    0:00.00 grep chromium $ kill -9 698   $ ps -ef | grep chromium   502   698   811   0   0:01.24 ??         0:07.28 /Users/lucius/chromium/src/xcodebuild/Debug/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium   502   854   732   0   0:00.00 ttys001    0:00.00 grep chromium 

Answer 1

If you're trying to kill -9 it, you have the correct PID, and nothing happens, then you don't have permissions to kill the process.

Solution:

$ sudo kill -9 PID 

---

Okay, sure enough Mac OS/X does give an error message for this case:

$ kill -9 196 -bash: kill: (196) - Operation not permitted 

So, if you're not getting an error message, you somehow aren't getting the right PID.

Answer 2

Some cases you might want to kill all the process running in a specific port. For example, if I am running a node app on 3000 port and I want to kill that and start a new one; then I found this command useful.

Find the process IDs running on TCP port 3000 and kill it

kill -9 `lsof -i TCP:3000 | awk '/LISTEN/{print $2}'`