Xcode 5 iOS7 - too many ScriptAgent processes

Question

Running UIAutomation scripts using xcode-instruments creates duplicate processes like this:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator7.0.sdk/Developer/usr/bin/ScriptAgent

These processes can't be killed and only system reboot will kill them. Also, the script is stopped and these lines are printed:

2013-10-23 14:54:57.850 ScriptAgent[35342:2d07] CLTilesManagerClient: initialize, sSharedTilesManagerClient 
2013-10-23 14:54:57.850 ScriptAgent[35342:2d07] CLTilesManagerClient: init 
2013-10-23 14:54:57.851 ScriptAgent[35342:2d07] CLTilesManagerClient: reconnecting, 0x962eef0

Any idea how to solve this?

Answer 1

You only need to kill the parent process of these zombie processes, and they will go away. This works in Mavericks and Xcode 5.1, at least:

$ ps -edf | \
grep [x]pcproxy_sim | awk '{print $3}' | \
sort | uniq | \
xargs -I{} echo "kill -9 {}" | sh

The first line lists all processes. The second line extracts the PPID column (parent PID) of xpcproxy_sim processes. The third line removes duplicate entries, and the last line generates the command to kill each process and passes it to a shell for execution.