Kill program Mac OSX terminal can sometimes be necessary

You can do this by pressing and holding the Power button your keyboard surface (if you have a notebook) or by unplugging your Mac from the power adapter (if you have a desktop). Your Mac will turn off. Give it about 10 seconds to cool down from the stuck app, as the CPU is undoubtedly on fire right about now.

Even though OS X is a pleasure to work with, we have all had a program or process freeze up. It won’t quit by using “Force quit”. What do you do now? Fortunately, this can be solved quite easily. To kill program Mac OS X terminal on Leopard / Snow leopard / Lion do the following commands:

Get the ID of the program

Kill the program

This will give you the number of the processes found (if any). Now just close them with this command

So, for example to kill my activity monitor program

Now the offending program will shut down immediately, no matter what it was doing. This is, however, a last resort. You will lose any unsaved changes.

What happens behind the scenes when you kill the program is a bit different from regular operations. Normally, the operating system asks the program nicely to go away. With the above kill command, it simply shuts it down immediately without asking or telling it anything. There you go. Gone.

Kill Running App Mac Free

Has this post got you interested? Would you like to learn how to do more interesting stuff in OS X’s terminal , than just kill a program. Then read these 10 commands. Even more interested? The OS X terminal is built on top of bash, and you can read more about it in this tutorial.