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Sometimes when my vscode hangs up, and I have to force-quit it, it is as though it will not start back up again until I restart my computer. Before shutting the computer down I tried looking for its id because I had a suspicion that it is already running and that's why it wouldn't start a new window up.

$ ps aux | grep vscode
rtviii     44456  0.0 0.0   8908   656 pts/0    S+  10:21  0:00 grep ... vscode
$ ps aux | grep vscode
rtviii     44459  0.0 0.0   8908   656 pts/0    S+  10:21  0:00 grep ... vscode
...

I discovered that there indeed is this process that looks like vscode although the program itself is not functioning (no window, can't open files, just clicked the icon to no effect).

I tried kill -9ing the process but the system reports that this pid doesn't exist. It seems that every time that I poll for it, it keeps advancing to the higher pid, and that's why I can't pin it down.

Can somebody explain what can be the source of this behavior and how to deal with it?

Andy Dalton
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rtviii
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1 Answers1

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The process you're seeing from ps is the grep process you're using to filter for lines containing vscode, not vscode itself. Every time you run it, you're running a new instance of grep so it gets a new pid. You can't kill that process because by the time you go to kill it, grep has already terminated.

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/74186/90691

Andy Dalton
  • 13,993