Kill Process Workflow

[ngreenstein]

I made a workflow to kill processes quickly.

 

You can grab it (and read more about it) on GitHub.

Direct download link.

 

Here are some highlights:

• Autocompletes process names
• Learns and prioritizes processes you kill frequently
• Shows icons when possible
• Shows CPU usage
• Shows process paths
• Ignores case

Screenshot:

Enjoy, and feel free to share any feedback you have.

Edited March 16, 2013 by ngreenstein

[samvlu]

Awesome! Just what I was looking for.

Works very well.

[nikipore]

Very nice. I'd suggest though to pass the pid to args and kill using

kill -9 <pid>

This has less potential side effects.

Edited March 16, 2013 by nikipore

[ngreenstein]

@samvlu Thanks, glad you like it!

@nikipore Hmm, source for that? I've never had issues with killall.

[nikipore]

@ngreenstein: I mean that you might have several processes sharing a name; say you have three bash sessions, and only one of them hangs (CPU ~100%), would you want to kill'em all, or just the bad one?

[ngreenstein]

Oh, great point. I didn't think of that at all. I'll update it today. Thanks for the feedback!

[ngreenstein]

Ok, @nikipore, I updated it to use `kill -9` by default. Feel free to re-download.

 

You can still kill all processes with matching names by actioning with command-return.

[nikipore]

Cool for the kill -9 part, much safer now. The command-return part is very nice (the best of both worlds), but is broken for me (it shows up, but no action results).

[ngreenstein]

Oops, thanks for pointing that out. Forgot quotation marks, so processes with spaces in the name didn't work. Should be fixed now.

[nikipore]

Nope. My test case: Open Terminal.app, press Command-N twice. Then you have two processes named "bash". Kill one of them just pressing Enter (works). Kill the other two pressing Command-Enter (doesn't work).

[ngreenstein]

Try with anything other than bash and let me know if it works for you. I think the problem is that bash has a hyphen at the beginning of the process name and killall is trying to interpret that as a flag (even though it's in quotes). Any ideas?

 

Thanks for your help with testing this!

[nikipore]

Now I started two Python interpreters. Their process name is something like this (these are MacPort Python 2.6 interpreteres, just in case you wonder):

 

 8980 ttys001    0:00.02 /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python

 

And it doesn't work. I haven't looked into your code, but since youre identifying all processes correctly, why don't you pass all process IDs to the arg and put the row-specific pid in the first position? Then the scripts should pretty much look the same, except that one loops over all pids, and the other only picks the first one. No issues with weird names whatsoever.

Edited March 16, 2013 by nikipore

[ngreenstein]

Ok, just pushed another update. Let me know if it changes anything.

 

It now works perfectly OMM for Python, bash, and every other process I've tried it with.

 

I don't have MacPorts to test with, but at this point I can't repro any issues.

 

Thanks for your help!

[nikipore]

No, it doesn't. The two "-bash" test case still fails.

[ngreenstein]

Can't repro at all. Works OMM. Sorry.

[nikipore]

Debugged it and found the reason: Due to a hotkey conflict, the action wasn't triggered at all. Everything works perfectly now. Thanks!

[ngreenstein]

Great, glad it's sorted out.

 

Hope you find it useful

[altryne]

awesome one! thanx

 

One thing, how about not requiring the query, and when there's no query, showing the top CPU consuming procceses, and then filtering by typed query?

Edited March 16, 2013 by altryne

[sudopeople]

I edited the icon to have a white border so that it's visible in the black. I figured I'd put it here for anyone that wants it.

 

Old:

 

New:

 

PNG here:

[ngreenstein]

Good idea, thank you! Please submit a pull request on GitHub and I'll add this change.

 

I edited the icon to have a white border so that it's visible in the black. I figured I'd put it here for anyone that wants it.

 

Old:

 

New:

 

PNG here:

[sudopeople]

Good idea, thank you! Please submit a pull request on GitHub and I'll add this change.

 

Done. Thanks for all your work!

[Smith007]

Can we please have an option to relaunch an app, not just kill it? For example if we hold the Shift key with "kill" the workflow can forcequit and relaunch the app, that would be very useful!

[RuslanI]

Can we please have an option to relaunch an app, not just kill it? For example if we hold the Shift key with "kill" the workflow can forcequit and relaunch the app, that would be very useful!

 

Yes, this is quite good! 

Or have a special keyword for killing and relaunching. I'm OK with any option as long as there is such functionality. 

[ngreenstein]

Can we please have an option to relaunch an app, not just kill it? For example if we hold the Shift key with "kill" the workflow can forcequit and relaunch the app, that would be very useful!

 

 

Yes, this is quite good! 

Or have a special keyword for killing and relaunching. I'm OK with any option as long as there is such functionality. 

 

That's a great idea! I'm afraid I don't have time to add this at the moment, but, if anyone feels up to it, they're more than welcome to submit a pull request on the GitHub repo. Thanks!

[madvas]

Very good workflow! Thank you