How to kill a back ground program that belongs to the root.

[General]

Hi, I’m new to the unix world. I have a program that runs as a system process belonging to root user on log in (background app) it is a status program for my wirless signal. It has a bad memory leak and I can’t get the company to believe that there software has a problem. Any way how can I make a startup script to kill this program so I don’t have to do it every time I log in or restart my computer. I have been using a program named memory usage getter to kill it and reclaim the memory. It doesn’t show up in login items or I could stop it there.

[Ray_Barber]

First check in your /Library/StartupItems/ folder to see if the offending app is in there. If it is, then move it somewhere else to see if that resolves your issue. If not, you can try to kill the process by PID, “kill PID”, where PID is the process ID number. Here’s a script I wrote a while back to kill a process by name, you can adjust it to suit your needs…

–Click here to open this script in a new Script Editor window.

display dialog “Enter the Name of the Application You Wish to Kill” default answer “”
set appName to (text returned of result)
do shell script “ps ax | grep -i " & appName & " | grep -v grep | cut -c 1-6”
set pNum to result
set prName to do shell script “ps cax | grep -i " & appName & " | awk ‘{print $5, $6}’”
display dialog “Kill Application • " & prName & " PID#” & pNum buttons {“Kill It!”, “Cancel”} default button 2
if button returned of result is “Kill It!” then
try
do shell script "kill -15 " & pNum
on error
display dialog “The Process Named “” & appName & “” Is Not Running”
end try
end if

http://scriptbuilders.net

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[This script was automatically tagged for color coded syntax by Script to Markup Code]
You may need to adjust the line "do shell script “kill -15 " & pNum” to
do shell script "kill -15 " & pNum with administrator privileges