Let’s just assume that you are using Mac (OSX) and for a second that you are having trouble with a program, this program is currently frozen and unresponsive. What can you do besides select “force quit”? The solution to your problem is the kill command.
We’ve mentioned the kill command before, but I’m sure that some of you are unaware it can be used in Mac’s OSX. Since Mac is based on UNIX, it can become very powerful when actually utilized.
For those who don’t know, “kill” is used to stop a process or suspend a process. In this case, we’re going to kill a process because it has stopped responding.
- Open up a terminal session on your Mac.
- In the terminal session, type the following commands in:
- ps -ax or ps -acx
- This will give you a list of all processes currently running on your system. Adding to that, it will display the time, whether or not it’s running from on a terminal session and, its entire path name.
- This will give you a list of all processes currently running on your system. Adding to that, it will display the time, whether or not it’s running from on a terminal session and, its entire path name.
- ps -ax or ps -acx
- Since we already know what program is currently causing problems on your machine we can go ahead and grep it. Like so….
- ps -ax | grep [program]
- where “[program]” is you can go ahead and put the program’s name in. So, MS Word would be “Word”
- ps -ax | grep Word
- this is what it would look like when grepping for MS Word
- this is what it would look like when grepping for MS Word
- ps -ax | grep [program]
- Kill it with fire… Actually, kill it with the kill command… kill [pid]
- in this case, the PID is 5771.
- Which means, you would enter the following kill 5771.
- Which means, you would enter the following kill 5771.
- in this case, the PID is 5771.
- MS Word will most likely reopen with “(recovered)” at the top where you usually see the files name.
The Caffeinated Admin 