The ditto program is a command line tool for copying files and merging directories as well as extracting archives. Earlier in the evening I had been trying to extract what appears to be a corrupted .ZIP file from the finder which had failed a couple of times as it contained a directory structure but wasn’t creating the directories. In the end I made the directories by hand and then extracted it from the command line with “unzip”.

It seems that each of the failed extractions from the finder with the BOMArchiveHelper system utility left the ditto process running, even when I force quit the crashed BOMArchiveHelper instance. From looking at the process hierarchy, the ditto processes were running directly under launchd so it makes sense that they wouldn’t have been killed with BOMArchiveHelper as they aren’t children of it.

Killing each of the ditto processes from the Activity Monitor returned by MacBook Pro to it’s normal responsive self. Just remember that killing a crashed process might not always get rid of everything that it has spawned!

The post ditto 100% CPU usage in Mac OS X first appeared on Spheron1.

In Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard), this presents a bit of a problem as Activity Monitor can no long be moved as the path to activitymonitord is now hard coded for some reason. If you do move it, then Activity Monitor appears to start and then just hangs.

If you fire up the Console application to take a look at the syslog, then you’ll see messages along the lines of:

18/03/2010 22:20:34 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor[1716]) posix_spawn(“/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/activitymonitord”, …): No such file or directory
18/03/2010 22:20:34 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor[1716]) Exited with exit code: 1
18/03/2010 22:20:34 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.ActivityMonitor) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

There is a similar problem with the System Preferences application if you are trying to install custom preference panes such as Growl where the install window will hang with similar looking console messages:

18/03/2010 22:50:46 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.systempreferences.install) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
18/03/2010 22:50:56 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.systempreferences.install[2390]) posix_spawn(“/Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/Resources/installAssistant”, …): No such file or directory
18/03/2010 22:50:56 com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.systempreferences.install[2390]) Exited with exit code: 1

This is only a problem when installing new preference panes, and the System Preferences will work fine normally when moved.

Hopefully this will save someone the headache of trying to diagnose this. I was on the verge of doing a re-install, having only just installed OS X in the first place and started moving everything to be how I like it!

The post Activity Monitor in Snow Leopard first appeared on Spheron1.