How do I quit an application that isn't responding?

Any application that is not responding needs to be stopped or killed, but the commands are specific to the operating system.

• Mac OS X
• Windows
• Unix/Linux

Mac OS X

In Mac OS X, you may occasionally find that applications lock up and do not respond to any commands, including Quit. When this happens, sometimes the only solution is to issue a Force Quit command. Force quitting an application will not save your latest changes, but it will often allow you to revive the misbehaving application without restarting your entire computer.

To force quit an application, from the Apple menu, choose Force Quit.... Select the misbehaving application from the list, and then click Force quit. You can also bring up this window by pressing Command-Option-Esc.

Note: You cannot quit the Finder; the only option available to you is Relaunch, which will reload the Finder.

Windows

If your Task Manager gets stuck or unresponsive due to intensive apps and you are not able to kill the particular process. What do you do ? You press ctrl-alt-delete to open up the Task Manager and find the culprit. But you can kill also multiple processes using command prompt in Windows.

Unix/Linux

To kill the above process PID, use the kill command as shown. The above command will kill the process having pid=3139, where PID is a Numerical Value of process. Another way to perform the same function, can be rewritten as. Similarly 'kill -9 PID' is similar to 'kill -SIGKILL PID' and vice-versa.