Kill a frozen program to stop the spinning beachball
May 3, 2007 - 22 Comments
It happens to the best of us for reasons we don’t always understand, a Mac application just suddenly becomes unresponsive and we see the spinning beachball of death (SBOD for short). For those new to the Mac platform, getting around the spinning wait cursor might be confusing, so here’s two ways to do just that. The first method is through the GUI using Force Quit, and the second method is using the command line kill utility.
From the Finder using the Force Quit menu:
- Hit Command-Option-Escape to bring up the Force Quit menu
- Select the troubled application, and hit the ‘Force Quit’ button
From the Command Line with the kill command:
- At the command prompt type: killall [Application Name]
- for example: killall Transmit
well i had few times finder hangup and those combinations just didnt worked
hot to prevent this? (it was while connecting to win network, with different ip’s)
Right-clicking on the icon in the Dock
I believe the proper term is SPOD for Spinning PINWHEEL of Death, but beachball sounds better.
You can also find and kill processes through the Activity Monitor
well i had few (very rare exeptions, really) when finder hangs up. nothing possible the. cant run programs and so on…
Problem with doing it from Activity Monitor is that if you haven’t already got it open, and Finder starts playing up [in my experience] it’s quite hard to start activity monitor. I find killall Finder works very well (capitalisation important) in these instances.
A last resort to kill a prog may be to use Visor, http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor (i start it with ctrl-F1; however, an already launched Terminal.app is required to use it; for a way to launch Terminal.app at login see http://www.unix.com/showthread.php?t=30735 ).
No, the common term isn’t Spinning “Pinwheel” Of Death. It’s been Spinning “Pizza” Of Death, ever since the NeXTSTEP days in the 1990s. When the NeXT machines went from the greyscale display used with the Cube to the color displays with the 68030 “pizza box” NeXTstations, the spinning-disk cursor became colorized and reminded developers of a pizza pie. However, the OSX-reincarnated cursor is a bit of a morph between the MacOS beachball and the NeXTSTEP pizza, and now resembles a pinwheel somewhat.
Thanks! I didn’t think this would happen on a mac.. damn! one of the reasons i left the world of plastic computers in favor of aluminum… oh well, its still the better choice!
Yeah, Some times when dev’ing my mac gets stuck it’s because of the flash technique.
the force kill key combination Command+Option+Escape doesn’t work….
What can i press then at that moment??
Sometimes it reacts only at my hotcorners expose… caps lock is reacting, mouse is reacting only you can’t click nothing and the combo doesn’t work…
what to do then???
I did have high hopes that Mac would never have an app freeze up but, alas it did happen. Not knowing what the prompts were like ctrl+alt+del for a PC, I unplugged it and went to bed hoping the battery life would kill it (like on a PC laptop). LOL Mac batteries are awesome! Thanks for the info on how to kill frozen apps!
Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back!
How do I just stop a program from running without killing it entirely? I want to just have the program stop what it’s doing without force quitting.
With some apps you can hit Command+Period but this does not always work
there is an easier way than THAT!
on the TOP LEFT corner u will see an APPLE symbol, click on it scroll down until u see FORCE QUIT. than click on that and there u go
That does not work. Tried it. I think these Mac computer just wear out and then it’s time to dump them.
How do you get to the Command Line on a Mac so that you can type killall?
Yes, could someone explain how to do that. Is command line the same as the URL line?
I also have data on several Firefox pages, but cant save them now because the BBOD is spinning and the browser is just hung up. I would like to stop the script or whatever is the problem, without force quitting the whole thing, therefore losing all the data on my open web pages. This happens a lot with Firefox, and seems to happen more often if the app and your tabs have been open for several days, or with lots of tabs open.
I recorded a very important meeting using Garage Band and forgot to save it. The spinning beach ball has been rotating for two days. Is there any way to save that file? Does GarageBand auto save as you’re recording? Thanks.
The thing that sucks is that every single time I open Activity Monitor it freezes up like this, it’s kind of the opposite of what it does….
Thanks, this is very useful tip to me, as I’m new to MAC
Alright…PC tech here, trying to appease the appeal of my users who think they need a MAC to get ahead in technology.
Out of the box, I’ve had Safari lock up on MacBook Pros and maybe I skim-read, but there is no information above on how to ‘fix’ this problem except to kill the beachball. Rebooting doesn’t help. I suppose it’s never expected to crash, so there is no error message that tells you what is wrong — but it’s crashed here.
At least with the BSOD, you know WHAT driver has caused the problem(s).
Does anyone know how I can get another browser on this fresh laptop?
Get Chrome, it’s a good browser.
Thanks mate – CMD+Option+Esc phew! Glad I know that now!