Running lots of lsof commands causing kernel panics?

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Level 1

10 points

Running lots of lsof commands causing kernel panics?

I wanted to have a list of open network connections displayed on my desktop, with the names of the applications responsible for those connections shown as well, so I set up a GeekTool job to run the following command every 20 seconds and print the output on my desktop:

*lsof -i tcp -i udp +c 20 | awk '{print $1"\t"$5"\t"$8"\t"$9}' | column -t*

The problem is that this activity is causing lots of kernel panics. After having this command running every 20 seconds for maybe an hour or so (sometimes a bit longer, sometimes a bit less) a kernel panic will most definitely occur. The stack traces I'm seeing in the crash report dialog that shows up upon reboot are not very clear either -- the crashes don't seem to be occurring in lsof (it's always something different) but I have a feeling that it's the culprit here.

Does anyone have any insight on this?

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Sep 7, 2008 2:11 PM

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Answer 1

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Sep 7, 2008 2:18 PM in response to hassegilbert

I have no idea what GeekTool is but generating a comprehensive list of open network ports and their associated processes via lsof takes a lot longer than 20 seconds. I have a shell script that does this and it can go on for several minutes.

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Answer 2

hassegilbert Author

Level 1

10 points

Sep 8, 2008 1:28 AM in response to orangekay

Oh yeah -- the fact that there would be several such processes running simultaneously might be the source of the problem -- that makes sense. I'll try to go around this by running this command in a loop via a shell script, writing the output to a file that GeekTool can then simply read and display every 10 seconds or so. Thanks.

P.S. This is GeekTool: http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/

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Answer 3

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Sep 8, 2008 1:36 AM in response to hassegilbert

You'll be wasting monumental amounts of processor time on a task of astoundingly questionable practical value.

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Answer 4

hassegilbert Author

Level 1

10 points

Sep 8, 2008 1:51 AM in response to orangekay

You're definitely right in the sense that this sort of thing shouldn't be running all the time. What I wanted to do was to figure out some way to quickly and easily get this running whenever I needed it -- I might just wrap a shell script that does this into an application bundle with Platypus (http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus), using GeekTool for this seems like a dumber and dumber idea the more I think of it.

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