What To Do If Force Quit Fails

So you have an application on your MAC that does not want to shutdown at all. You try to force quit the application just to have it continue to hang on you giving you the lovely little rainbow of death. You want to shutdown but you cannot since the hanging application prevents you from doing so. Before manually forcing your MAC off by holding down the power button for several second, why not try killing the application first via command line.

To kill an application via command line you first need to find the process ID (PID) of said application. So start by launching the console on your MAC (found under the Applications\Utilities folder).

To generate a complete list of running processes, run the following command:

ps -ax

Look in the list for the name of the application that is hanging and make note of the number to the far left, this is the PID of the running process. TO end the hanging application, take the PID and type the following:

sudo kill PID#

You will be prompted for your password when using sudo. I like to use sudo just in case the application is not running as the current user and to prevent any potential permission problems (and because i use ubuntu a lot…)