It’s not a secret that I tend to dislike apple for the way they raped BSD to get it useable for the masses, but what they do to me from the programmers point of view, is insane. Let’s start out with a simple MAMP installation (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and a plain system() call in php:

system(“kill -9 `ps -ef | grep Acrobat | awk ‘{print $2}’`”);

In theory, this should find any process named Acrobat and hand its PID to the kill command. Bottom line: Acrobat gets terminated. Theoretically. Practically, it did survive as the shell command got executed

As it was a fresh install, the Safari update was missing and I did that thing, rebooted and did not change a single line of my php code and during the next and following tests, Acrobat got terminated correctly. My reply was pretty much like “WTF?!?”

Where’s the logic in there?