Pasteboard Server hangup at Ronge

Published May 13th, 2006 in Mac OS X, UNIX

Today I had a weird problem where copying and pasting stopped working. Since I really dislike restarting, I messed around and found a solution:

Run this in the Terminal:
ps -x | grep "/System/Library/CoreServices/pb[s]"

I got a result like this, if you don’t get any results skip the next step:
20829 p0- SN 0:00.28 /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs

So it looks like it’s working fine, but for some reason it’s hung up. So kill the server:
kill 20829

Now restart it:
nohup /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs &

Now copy and paste should work again, if it doesn’t work in an app, try restarting the app, that should do the trick.

1 Dave Batton May 14th, 2006 at 3:06 am

Perfect timing! Copy and paste just died on my a few minutes ago, so I decided to read some blogs before restarting. Your tip worked, so now I don’t have to restart. Thanks!
2 Marc Weinberger May 14th, 2006 at 3:01 pm

I had the same problem a few days ago, I think this was related due to the lack of a reboot after installing the latest security upgrade.
3 Nick Klockenga May 16th, 2006 at 12:02 am

I had same problem as Marc above. Nice to know
4 Kevin Ballard Jun 20th, 2006 at 1:05 pm

For reference, you can simply do a `killall pbs` rather than grepping for the pid first.
5 Matt Stoeffler Jul 26th, 2007 at 7:43 am

Nope, didn’t work. There must be another source to this problem. I notice that I also cannot search a file.

Ronge