Mac OSX is a stable operating system, but some of the applications on it might not be as stable. Applications on OSX do crash. If the application crashes then it’s fine, just re-launch it again. However, there are times that it just stops responding, takes up all your system resource and slows down your entire system as OSX figures out what to do.

When in this type of situation you can take matters in your hands by ‘killing’ the application process. ‘Kill’ is a UNIX term for force quitting and application. There are several ways to kill an unresponsive application process in OSX.

The terminal

This is a little bit geeky as it involved going to your terminal. The UNIX way. First you need to find out the process id for the application you want to kill, the command ‘top’ will display various information about currently running applications, including CPU usage and memory info. The information you need to look for is the ‘PID’. Type ‘top’ on your command prompt to find the process id (PID) then type ‘q’ to quit.

Then kill the process by typing ‘kill [pid]‘ where pid is the process number you get from the previous step. If it stills doesn’t work then you could try ‘kill -9 [pid]‘. ‘Kill -9′ is the take no prisoners method to forcibly quit an application in UNIX. It sends an unstoppable, untrappable kill signal. Some application data might be corrupted when use with this method of force quitting.

Alternatively you could use ‘killall’ command, which kill processes by name. For example if you want to kill TextEdit then type ‘killall TextEdit’.

Mac three finger salute

If talks about the terminal scare you then there is a friendlier way of doing this. Similar to Windows’s famous three finger salute, Macs also has it’s own not so famous three finger salute, command + option + esc. This will bring up a small box with the list of running application that you can choose to force quit.

Dock force quitting

A faster way to force quit an application would be from the dock itself. If the unresponsive running application has a dock icon, option + click on the application icon on the dock and hold on until the menu came out. If you notice it says ‘force quit’ as opposed to ‘quit’.

Please note that to kill or force quit is not very good for the application but if it is such a case where you can’t simply quit is the normal way, it might be your only option.

So how do you handle an unresponsive application?