5
I have CrashPlan running on my MacBook Pro, and it went a little haywire. Essentially, it caused a fork bomb. Fortunately, I had an open Terminal window and was able to run this command:
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
So the constant re-spawning has stopped. But, I still have over 900 java processes that aren't doing anything except pushing me up against my maximum process count. I would prefer not restarting my computer, as I have a lot of open code files, web pages, etc. Is there an easy way to force the system to reap these zombies? I would kill the parent process, but they're all started by launchd aka PID 1. At that point, it would be better to restart.
I have tried:
sudo kill -9 <PID>
sudo kill -9 java
sudo killall -9 java
Is there a way of killing the zombies once and for all without having to kill launchd to do it? Or will I have to restart in order to survive this zombie apocalypse?
Upvote for 'no way to meaningfully kill
launchd
without a reboot'; It's the sad truth, AFAICT. – ipmcc – 2013-01-04T13:22:02.510