Unkillable, bogus NSRunningApplication sitting in my Dock?

Question

I'm using Xcode 5.1.1 on OSX 10.9.4 to debug a Cocoa + OpenGL application. So far I've only ever run my app under the Xcode debugger. Last week I exited Xcode only to find an icon for my app still sitting in the Dock. Using Show In Finder led me to a debug executable inside Xcode's DerivedData. I eventually power cycled to get rid of it (more on that) and all was well until today. But I now have two of these icons sitting in my Dock.

The problem: these apps cannot be killed! Force Quit does nothing. They don't show up in the process list using 'ps aux' or Activity Monitor. A Restart just gets stuck in a loop trying to get rid of them. Only forcibly power-cycling the Mac works.

According to NSWorkspace's runningApplication method there are NSRunningApplication instances associated with these apps. But the process id's don't correspond to actual processes. Nothing relevant in the Console logs.

Anyone else ever encounter this? Any suggestions for getting NSWorkspace to get rid of bogus NSRunningApplication instances?

Answer 1

EDIT: I discovered the root cause of the problem! The app that 'owned' the pseudo-zombie Dock NSRunningApplication was not calling IOObjectRelease() after iterating each child of a IORegistryEntryGetChildIterator(). Gah this took me months to finally track this down. Basically I used breakpoints to do a binary search of the exact moment when the app 'pseudo-zombie-ized' other apps' NSRunningApplication. Still don't understand why IORegistry iteration hijacks NSRunningApplication.

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This fixes it for me:

sudo killall launchservicesd; sudo killall Dock; sudo killall Finder;

or in .bashrc:

alias killdock="sudo killall launchservicesd; sudo killall Dock; sudo killall Finder;"

NOTE: if you don't also kill Finder, then 'Reveal In Finder...' a.k.a. [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] activateFileViewerSelectingURLs:urls]; stops working in my app.