For some reason, I end up with a fair few Google Chrome Helper processes which stop responding, hogging CPU resources. Usually I just run killall Google\ Chrome\ Helper, however this kills all, including the responsive processes meaning that I have to restart Chrome.
Is there a flag for killall so it only affects unresponsive processes?
One way to do it is to use top to find the pid of the process using the most CPU. I started a bash CPU hog in one terminal:
bash -c "while true; do :; done" Then in another terminal I can kill it as follows:
kill $( top -l2 | grep bash | sort -nrk3 | awk '{print $1;exit}' ) Note, since this is osx, this is the BSD top and not the GNU version.
-l2 tells top to run for 2 iterations - the first needs to be ignored as it just reports 0% CPU for all processes.grep filters just the bash lines. Note this may need more work if your grep expression matches any other parts of the top output.sort sorts the output numerically in reverse by the 3rd column (CPU %)head gets the first line (highest CPU)cut gets the first column (PID)$() command substitution, and the numerical PID is just passed directly to killOn GNU/Linux machines the equivalent is:
kill $(top -bn1 | grep bash | sort -nrk9 | awk '{print $1;exit}') 
(Not Responding)appended to the name.