After forced quit, “killall Finder” says “No matching processes…” but PID still exists?

Question

Here's one for ya. Upon a forced quit of the Finder with unsuccessful relaunch, "killall Finder" in terminal returns:

"No matching processes belonging to you were found"

Oddly enough, the PID for finder does actually show up after a "ps -A" to reveal all processes. But the time is perpetually listed as 0:00:00, upon repeated PID listings.

I tried the following to manually launch it:

open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app

But it puked:

LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error -600 for the file /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app.

Any other ideas on a Finder relaunch that don't involve rebooting? (I usually have 6 spaces open at once, each with a handful of apps and it's a pain reloading them all.)

Answer 1

There's easy and slightly harder. First easy, you could probably use Activity Monitor to force quit it.
Harder, and the reason you're getting this message, is because your user didn't launch Finder, the system 'owns' it - you can only kill it if you elevate your privileges to super user(!), sudo killall Finder, and then it'll ask for your password(assuming your user account is an admin, otherwise this wouldn't work) just like Activity Monitor would. In certain *nix distros you can kill straight from top, as well.

Worse comes to worse, you could force log yourself off in a pinch, you could killall loginwindow(your user owns that one while you're logged in)