how to kill process in Mac OS X and not have it restart on its own

Question

When I run sudo kill -9 [PID] with the proper process ID, the process stops but then is restarted and has a new PID. I'm trying to kill the mysqld process.

How can I mimic the Activity Monitor in killing a process? In the Activity Monitor, when you press "Quit Process", the process permanently stops running, it is totally terminated. I figure that kill will do the same thing right?

I had both the Activity Monitor and the terminal next to each other to see if the command works, but every time I do sudo kill -9 [PID], the process in Activity monitor doesn't go away, it just refreshes with a new PID.

So... how do I kill the mysqld process via the terminal?

I did it from the activity monitor because the 'kill' command was not recognising the PID. Again unlike your case my mysqld did not restart as soon as I killed it from the Activity monitor. — Yoosaf Abdulla, Sep 28 '13 at 13:46
Ouch! Don't use -9 unless you REALLY need to. It's a violent thing to do to a process. Other signals allow a process to terminate in an orderly manner, but not -9! So it means that RAM buffers don't get flushed to disk, for example. This is a particularly bad thing to do to a database that is in the process of doing work; you'll come back to damaged tables. — Jan Steinman, Mar 04 '18 at 02:21

score 30 · Answer 1 · 2010-07-02T17:16:27.567

30

The process you are killing is probably being managed by launchd, the proper way to stop it and have it not restart is to use launchctl unload <path to plist>. The plist that controls that process is in either /Library/LaunchDaemons or /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. If it is a system process and not one of your own, then you will probably have to use sudo to get launchctl to work as desired.

A better way try and stop it might be;

${MYSQL_HOME}/bin/mysqladmin -u root -proot shutdown > /dev/null 2>&1

edited Jul 02 '10 at 17:16

answered Jul 02 '10 at 16:37

I'm trying to kill the `mysqld` process. I'm not sure if that is part of LaunchDaemons... but the following command is the correct way to stop the server from running `sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server stop` but I'm having problems with that, so I'm trying to kill the process directly. – Hristo Jul 02 '10 at 16:44
5

if it is being restated after `kill -9` the launchd is probably involved, even if indirectly. you can tell by using `launchctl list` – Jul 02 '10 at 16:56
the list doesn't have "mysql" in it. I will try your command up top. – Hristo Jul 02 '10 at 17:02
Redirect STDOUT and STDERR to /dev/null. – Hello71 Jul 02 '10 at 17:56
Using `-15` as a flag opposed to `-9` did the job. Thanks for your response! – Hristo Jul 02 '10 at 19:25
7

I had the same problem and was able to solve by removing mysql from launchd via `sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.oracle.oss.mysql.mysqld.plist` – Jeff Sep 08 '15 at 13:21
The `launchd` link is now broken. – Denys Kniazhev-Support Ukraine Mar 01 '17 at 08:38
I can see `com.oracle.oss.mysql.mysqld.plist` in /Library/LaunchDaemons and have used the command `sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.oracle.oss.mysql.mysqld.plist` only to receive the error message: `Could not find specified service` – Christia Mar 27 '17 at 21:33

score 22 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 07 '14 at 19:25

A couple of comments mention that "launchd is probably involved" - so I thought I'd put this out as an additional answer. As @jarrod-roberson says, you can check if launchd is involved by first running launchctl list | grep mysqld.

An important thing you learn here is whether MySQL was installed with Homebrew or not - Brew stores its launchctl files in a different location than where OSX puts the "regular" services.

On my OSX box, the plist files are in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ So I ran:

launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

to stop the MySQL server. I had previously looked in /Library/LaunchDaemons/ and /Library/LaunchAgents but didn't find a file with mysqld in its name.

You can also install a brew-based system called services, to manage all Brew-installed services applications, as described in this post - http://robots.thoughtbot.com/starting-and-stopping-background-services-with-homebrew I haven't tried this myself, though, so YMMV.

This is what fixed it for me. Always a pain when you are fighting multiple different ways to run a LAMP stack locally. — Patrick, Mar 15 '16 at 14:59
I had to use the Homebrew path to remove this, i.e. `/usr/local/opt/mysql/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist` — micjamking, Jan 14 '17 at 23:10

score 13 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 06 '11 at 22:29

13

I tried to kill the process by sending it the TERM signal, and that worked. The command was:

sudo kill -15 {PID}

edited Aug 06 '11 at 22:29

ChrisF

41,278
17
101
154

answered Jul 02 '10 at 17:25

Hristo

1,179
4
14
21

score 13 · Answer 4 · edited Jun 20 '18 at 18:11

13

For me, this worked once I figured out which label I was looking for.

launchctl list | egrep {DESIRED_LABEL}   
launchctl remove {DESIRED_LABEL}

edited Jun 20 '18 at 18:11

Scott C Wilson

2,376
4
22
31

answered Sep 20 '15 at 03:26

silverdagger

231
2
4

This helps me to finally kill Pulse Secure. Just note that the label for egrep can be partial keywords (like pulse), but the label for remove must be copied from the list output (like net.pulsesecure.pulsetray). – K. Symbol Apr 06 '20 at 13:00

score 7 · Answer 5 · edited Oct 01 '15 at 13:42

7

Unload the service and stop the daemon:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysql.plist

Load the service and start the daemon:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysql.plist

edited Oct 01 '15 at 13:42

8bittree

2,900
1
17
28

answered Oct 01 '15 at 12:49

Osaev

71
1
1

This worked for me except that is was `com.oracle.oss.mysql.mysqld.plist` My local MySQL was installed from downloading from MySQL, not via homebrew. – Jason Nov 12 '15 at 18:26

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 19 '17 at 12:16

I solved editing the /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysql.plist file, changing the attribute true to false

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <false />
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.mysql.mysqld</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe</string>
      <string>--user=mysql</string>
    </array>
  </dict>
</plist>

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Jul 02 '10 at 16:36

2

What process are you trying to kill? Some processes in Mac OS X (e.g., the Dock, some system processes) automatically respawn if they're killed.

answered Jul 02 '10 at 16:36

mipadi

4,358
1
27
27

I'm trying to kill the `mysqld` process – Hristo Jul 02 '10 at 16:43
Probably managed by `launchd`, then, which will restart it if the process dies. – mipadi Jul 02 '10 at 17:25

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Mar 02 '17 at 13:33

0

There is a process running on your machine that is blocking mysql. Run

ps auxwww | grep mysql

then do

kill -15 {PID}

My process that was blocking it was _mysql

answered Mar 02 '17 at 13:33

Jonathan O

11

how to kill process in Mac OS X and not have it restart on its own

8 Answers8

Linked