What is osascript and how can I close it?

Question

What is osascript and how can I close it?

Hi,

I am checking the activity monitor application on my early 2011 MacBook Pro that is running Mac OS High Sierra. I have been realising for quite some time that there are two processes called “osascript” that uses a lot of my memory. I googled it some time ago and found out a way of killing the process (I don’t remember it was a long time ago) yet, after killing them they just restarted and little by little they keep using memory. Last time I deleted them, nothing happened to my computer other than seeing them re-starting, without me doing anything, and then going up in the amount of memory used.

Does anyone have an idea of how can I identify what are they doing and, more importantly, kill them in a way that they don’t reappear?

you can see an image of the activity monitor.

Posted on Apr 15, 2021 8:15 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 17, 2021 1:52 PM in response to BDAqua

I killed the processes with:

kill -9 PID

And rebooted the computer after but the processes returned :’(. Again, starting from 5mb of memory and going up quickly. so I follow your advice and went safe mode. In there the processes didn’t started.

I downloaded etrecheck as to get a report and asked about what to do, but I saw that there were some mayor issues. One of them was that there were adware. So I figure out to trash all the files etrecheck found. Still I could see them using more memory in the activity monitor. After trashing everything I killed the processes and that was it. They didn’t came back!!! :D

Many thanks for your help!

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,253 points

Apr 15, 2021 9:41 AM in response to Save_the_crab

Then, if it comes back...

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

EtreCheck is a FREE simple little diagnostic tool to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. It will not display any personal info.

https://www.etrecheck.com/

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

Whew, they've changed pastebin & made it harder, but after pasting in, click Create new paste button, then Embed button, then copy the URL...

The important part of the above is...

https://pastebin.com/embed_js/KuvnghqA

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck. In a Reply before you click post, look for this to add longer texts...

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Answer 3

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,144 points

Apr 15, 2021 8:27 AM in response to Save_the_crab

The osascript application is normally a command-line invoked application that can run AppleScripts and JavaScript for Automation scripts. It can also be invoked from an application as a background process to run the preceding types of scripts. It should not be using that much RAM as you show, nor should it be self-starting unless the application that is launching it is self-restarting.

Open the Terminal application and type nothing else but the following:

kill -9 -ix osascript

which will kill those running processes. Then immediately reboot your Mac.

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What is osascript and how can I close it?

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