Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Killing a Command in Progress

If you’ve launched a command from the shell running in the foreground, and want to kill it immediately, type ^C. The shell recognizes ^C as meaning, “terminate the current foreground command right now.” So if you are displaying a very long file (say, with the cat command) and want to stop, type ^C:

➜ cat bigfile
This is a very long file with many lines. Blah blah blah
blah blah blah blahblahblah ^C
➜

To kill a program running in the background, you can bring it into the foreground with fg and then type ^C. Alternatively, you can use the kill command (for more information, see Controlling Processes).

Killing a program is not a friendly way to end it. If the program has its own way to exit, use that when possible: see the sidebar for details.

Surviving a Kill

Killing a foreground program with ^C may leave your shell in an odd or unresponsive state, perhaps not displaying the keystrokes you type. This happens because the killed program had no opportunity to clean up after itself. If this happens to you:

1. Press ^J to get a shell prompt. This produces the same character as the Enter key (a newline) but will work even if Enter does not.

2. Type the shell command reset (even if the letters don’t appear while you type) and press ^J again to run this command. This should bring your shell back to normal.

^C works only within shells. It will likely have no effect if typed in a window that is not a shell window. Additionally, some programs are written to “catch” the ^C and ...