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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2007-03-19, 15:49

Killing an Unresponsive Application

If an application has frozen or stopped responding to input, the last resort method of terminating it is colloquially called "force quitting" it. You should only force an application to quit if you have no other options. Terminating an application in this way will cause you to lose all data that the application is processing and may cause open files to be corrupted.

There are four common methods in Mac OS X to "Force Quit" an application that has stopped responding. These include:
  1. cmd-opt-esc: Pressing the keystroke combination of command (Apple), option, and escape should cause the "Force Quit Applications" window to appear. This window can also be accessed from the Apple menu in any application that is still responsive. If an application does not immediately respond to cmd-opt-esc, you may hold cmd-opt-shift-esc for several seconds to terminate the frontmost application.
  2. Dock icon's Force Quit: Holding the control key and clicking or right-clicking an application's Dock icon will present a menu of functions including the standard "Quit" item. Hold also the option key to change the "Quit" item to "Force Quit".
  3. Activity Monitor's "Quit Process": Launch the "Activity Monitor" application from the /Applications/Utilities folder and you will see a list of all running applications and processes on your computer. Choose a process name from the list and choose "Quit Process" from the View menu. Then click "Force Quit" in the sheet that appears.
  4. The "kill" command: Launch the "Terminal" application from the /Applications/Utilities folder. Alternatively, externally connect to the machine using an SSH or terminal account. At the command-line interface, enter the command "ps uxc". A multi-column output of text will appear that describes the currently active process owned by your username. The second column, named PID, should contain a unique number for each process. Find the process you want to quit and run the command "kill -9 NUMBER" where NUMBER is the number you found. For example, "kill -9 11223" would terminate the process with PID 11223.

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