Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!us.feeder.erje.net!news2.arglkargh.de!news.mixmin.net!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mickey MacMouse Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: Process names Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 18:17:34 +1300 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 18 Message-ID: <201220141817346353%mickey@mousehouse.com> References: <201220141430104225%mickey@mousehouse.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: DjFVAL4V9LOPihSa5VEp5A.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Thoth/1.5.4 (Carbon/OS X) X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com comp.sys.mac.system:67740 In article <201220141430104225%mickey@mousehouse.com>, Mickey MacMouse wrote: > I was just looking at Process Viewer to check CPU usage of an app and > spotted a few weird processes popping up and disappearing. These had > strange names like the Apple logo, the infinity sumbol, or a few other > weird characters. I think they were all Root processes. Anyone know > what these are? I was wrong. They are so quick to appear and disappear that I thought I had read them as root. They are instead ??? user. It is tricky to get a screengrab of one due to the speed and being random. I did get one as shown in the top entry of this screengrab. http://s12.postimg.org/aspu6wkgd/Process_Viewer.jpg Most are single character names. A few have been two to three characters. They could just be artefacts of Process Viewer being too slow to retrieve all the information as with the impossible CPU percentage. It is a slow old G3 CRT iMac.