Today my computer was running hot all day, fans buzzing wildly.  Honestly I didn’t think too much of it since I was working with the iPhone simulator and just assumed that that was the cause.

After taking some time off to play with the dog, I came back to it still buzzing loudly.  I checked my iStat Menu to see what processes were taking up the most resources and saw ‘cupsd’.  Google told me it was related to my printer.  But I couldn’t kill the process for the life of me.  I tried killall, kill -9, and the activity monitor.  Nothing.

In activity monitor I saw another process Inkjet9 that was taking up even more resources.  And there were two of them!  Google didn’t have anything to say about Inkjet9.  I couldn’t killall or kill -9 this one because it didn’t show up in my ps -A.  I was able to kill it in Activity monitor, but it just respawned.  And to top it off, restarting my computer didn’t help either.

Uh oh … I’ve been hacked.  At least that’s what my initial thought was.

What I did find with my ps -A was a few print jobs that I had sent off this morning to my wireless HP printer.  Yup, and they had never printed.  I was able to kill all the specific print job related tasks and that took care of the rest of the runaway processes.

It is a good thing my aging laptop didn’t fry after running hot for some 8 hours.  Eh, then I could’ve bought a new one… hah.

Anyway.  Since nothing showed up for my Google on Inkjet9, I wanted to write a little post incase someone else had the same random problem I did.  It makes me scratch my head why Inkjet9 showed up in iStat Menu and Activity Monitor but not in ps -A.  I have no idea.

Hope this helps!