(process name)

Why some process names has () around them, like “(mdimport)”?

set process_list to do shell script "ps -Acr -o command | sed 1d | sed 's/^ *//'"

Not on my machine, cirno. I have an mdimportserver process, but no (mdimport) process. Is it always there?

These things come and go.

(SecurityAgent)
(date)
(open)

Hello

On my French Mac OS X 10.4.8, the result is:

"Script Editor
WindowServer
UniversalAccess
automount
SystemUIServer
configd
syslogd
coreaudiod
diskarbitrationd
.

Yvan KOENIG

hi cirno,

  1. where did you get the command from?
  2. what are you trying to do? (ie, why do you care if some processes have parentheses?)
  3. (most important) what happens if you don’t suppress all the information in ‘ps’, like this:
set process_list to do shell script "ps Aucr"

what is the ‘state’, who is the owner of the process, etc, etc. you may want to do a ‘man ps’ in the Terminal for more options but i would think the output above would show the differences between these and other processes, or the similarities between processes that show up like this.

i’d do it myself but like the others above i can’t seem to reproduce it here (10.4.8).

  1. what version of OS X are we talking here?

cheers.