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Kill a frozen program to stop the spinning beachball

May 3rd, 2007 - How to, Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting

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

Posted by: Bill Ellis

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Comments:

Comments: 8

Comment from deck2
Time: May 3, 2007, 4:56 am

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)

Comment from Alain
Time: May 3, 2007, 8:01 am

Right-clicking on the icon in the Dock

Comment from Weaver
Time: May 3, 2007, 11:55 am

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

Comment from deck2
Time: May 8, 2007, 1:54 am

well i had few (very rare exeptions, really) when finder hangs up. nothing possible the. cant run programs and so on…

Comment from Jasper
Time: May 9, 2007, 12:51 am

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.

Comment from Jim
Time: May 15, 2007, 1:58 am

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 ).

Comment from Van
Time: June 16, 2007, 8:30 pm

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.

Comment from cat
Time: July 23, 2009, 10:03 pm

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!

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May 3rd, 2007