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Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual
book

Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

by David Pogue
October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
928 pages
34h 56m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

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.

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:

  • Force quit the usual way. Choose →Force Quit to terminate the stuck program, or use one of the other force-quit methods described on Force Quitting Programs.

  • 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 Activity Monitor program (in Applications→Utilities), which shows everything that’s running. Double-click a program and then, in the resulting dialog box, click Quit to force quit it. (Unix hounds: You can also use the kill command in Terminal, as described on 20 Useful Unix Utilities.)

    Tip

    If you find yourself having to quit the Dock more than once, here’s an easier way: Make yourself a little AppleScript (Chapter 7) consisting of a single line: tell application Dock to quit. Save it as an application. Whenever you feel that ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449314828Errata Page