Does anyone know what this is?

[dsnort]

Take a look at this screen snapshot of my Macbook Activity Monitor. Of interest is the top three processes; cut, grep, and sh. These processes keep flashing on, and turning off. They'll be on for about a second, off for about 5 seconds, and then on again. The one time I was able to inspect one, it said the parent process was terminated. Is this a virus or malware trying to start in MacOS? Anybody seen anything like this before?

 

[jlewis2k1]

grep: is a command line utility for Unix.
sh: should be the shell of the system
cut: is most likely another utility for unix.

you can use this to help determine what they do exactly

It is basically the man pages for unix (manual)
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/alphabetical/index.html

 

[elbirth]

grep and sh are terminal commands and are just a part of unix. I would assume "cut" is there as well, but I don't recall a "cut" command in the unix command line.
grep searches inside a given file for a certain string and sh is used in regards to the shell being used in the terminal.

they should be harmless, but it is curious that they're showing and disappearing like that....

 

[gekko513]

"Cut" cuts out specific columns in whitespace separated text. The combination of grep and cut can be used for instance to record statistics for webservers by going through the server log files.

 

[elbirth]

"Cut" cuts out specific columns in whitespace separated text. The combination of grep and cut can be used for instance to record statistics for webservers by going through the server log files.

aha, ok that makes sense


so yeah... my guess is that you've got some process that is using command line commands in the background from time to time, and when it's processing those commands show up, and when it's done, they go away... perfectly normal

 

[dsnort]

Aha, I found it. It was the CoreDuoTemp program. Thanks folks, I was worried there for a sec.

 

[yellow]

For others that might read this in the future..

When in doubt, it's always helpful to change the "Show" display settings of Activity Monitor to "All Processes, Hierarchically".
This will show you the parent process that spawned the child processes in question.