Mac OS X terminal killall won't kill running process

Question

I have an instance of lighttpd running. When I do "ps -axc" the process is listed as

"614 ?? 0:00.15 lighttpd"

But when I do "killall lighttpd" I get

No matching processes belonging to you were found

I'm on Mac OS X 10.5.6. Is there something I'm missing?

Answer 1

Does it belong to you ? If you do

ps aux | grep lighttpd

that will give you the user id associated with that process (I'm guessing it's chowned to another user)

Answer 2

As per the other response, if it's not your process, prepend sudo if you're an administrator. If not, you may be out of luck.

Also, try sudo killall -9 lighttpd which sends the specific signal KILL instead of TERM.

Just to be sure you can also try sudo kill -9 614 using the PID.

Answer 3

i have also problems with killing some programs. i use force quit, kill -(1-15) pid but it doesnt work. it has status E (trying to exit) but it just wont exit... is there any other way then reboot? i have mac osx 1.5

Answer 4

Is the task written in the ps aux list in brackets? If so, it is a zombie, it is waiting some I/O task, which probably never completes. You can't kill it as far as I know.