Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Frozen Programs (Force Quitting)

The occasional unresponsive application has become such a part of Mac OS X life that, among the Mac cognoscenti online, the dreaded, endless “please wait” cursor has been given its own acronym: SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death). When the SBOD strikes, no amount of mouse clicking and keyboard pounding will get you out of the recalcitrant program.

The situation is clearly better in Mac OS X 10.2. Now, at least, your cursor turns back into an arrow when you move it off of the balky program’s window. But that doesn’t stop the balkiness.

Here are the different ways you can go about force quitting a stuck program (the equivalent of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete in Windows), in increasing order of desperation:

• Use the Dock. If you can’t use the program’s regularly scheduled File→Quit command, try Control-clicking its Dock icon and choosing Quit from the pop-up menu.

• Force quit the usual way. Choose

  

  →Force Quit to terminate the stuck program, or use one of the other force-quit methods described in Section 4.1.2.

• Force quit the sneaky way. Some programs, including the Dock, don’t show up at all in the usual Force Quit dialog box. Your next attempt, therefore, should be to open the Process Viewer program (in Applications→Utilities), which shows everything that’s running. Double-click a program to force quit it. (Unix hounds: You can also use the kill command in Terminal, ...