Force-quit with ps-ax/kill

More often than not, when an application doesn’t respond and you want to force-quit, you just need to press command+option+Esc, select the application from the pop up menu, and that’s it (another option is to ctrl-click the icon on the dock, and the force-quit option will be there).

However, there are times in which not even that will work. There is another slightly more effective method:

a) Open a terminal (you can use the one embedded on OS X via Applications–>Terminal)
b) Enter “ps -ax | grep -i <name of the application>” (without the quotes). A list of processes will print.
c) Find the PID (process identification number, on the first column) of the application you want to quit.
d) Enter “kill -9 <PID>” without the quotes and that’s it.

Things to consider: if you just enter “ps -ax” the complete list of processes will print. You could still just find the PID of the application you want to quit and it’d be the same, but it’d be more troublesome to find it. As a rule of thumb, do not mess with any process that isn’t in the Applications/ folder unless you know what you’re doing. Also, consider that no changes will be saved -just like with the more typical, GUI-based force-quit method.

Technorati Tags: Crash, Unix commands, Terminal

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Written by Humberto Cueva on October 24, 2007 at 9:07 pm - Force-quit with ps-ax/kill has 3 comments - Categorized in Intermediate Tips, OS X Tips, Terminal Tips

3 Responses to “Force-quit with ps-ax/kill”

1. 
   Omer Zach
   Alternatively, you could get the Process Identification Number from the Activity Monitor utility and then only enter the last command. October 24th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
   
   
2. 
   conann
   Kill -2 or 6 is a good friend if you want to kill a process but keep the program.
   
   to find the PID I use the "top" command in a shell October 25th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
   
   
3. 
   Rob
   Yeah, great, but what do I do if kill -9 doesn't do the trick? Of course, "force quit" doesn't either. Do I have to reboot to get rid of that program?
   
   The process is in state E (willing to exit) for minutes now, and I can kill it as often as I like without results. Something is seriously broken in Mac OS...
   
   robert@apfel:~/fm> date
   Tue Jul 8 17:49:05 CDT 2008
   robert@apfel:~/fm> ps ax | grep -i parall
   187 ?? S 0:07.38 /Library/StartupItems/Parallels/pvsnatd
   1246 ?? E 0:00.00 (Parallels)
   1299 p3 R+ 0:00.00 grep -i parall
   robert@apfel:~/fm> kill -KILL 1246
   robert@apfel:~/fm> ps ax | grep -i parall
   187 ?? S 0:07.41 /Library/StartupItems/Parallels/pvsnatd
   1246 ?? E 0:00.00 (Parallels)
   1306 p3 S+ 0:00.00 grep -i parall
   robert@apfel:~/fm> date
   Tue Jul 8 17:54:34 CDT 2008
   robert@apfel:~/fm> ps ax | grep -i parall
   187 ?? S 0:07.41 /Library/StartupItems/Parallels/pvsnatd
   1246 ?? E 0:00.00 (Parallels)
   1309 p3 R+ 0:00.00 grep -i parall July 8th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
   
   

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