B.3. Frozen Programs (Force Quitting) The occasional unresponsive application has become such a part of Mac OS X life that, among the Mac cognoscenti online, the dreaded, endless " please wait" cursor has been given its own acronym: SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death). When the SBOD strikes, no amount of mouse clicking and keyboard pounding will get you out of the recalcitrant program. Here are the different ways you can go about force quitting a stuck program (the equivalent of pressing Control-Alt-Delete in Windows), in increasing order of desperation: -
Use the Dock . If you can't use the program's regular File Quit command, try Control-clicking its Dock icon and choosing Quit from the pop-up menu. -
Force quit the usual way . Choose a Force Quit to terminate the stuck program, or use one of the other force-quit methods described on Section 5.1.1. -
Force quit the sneaky way . Some programs, including the Dock, don't show up at all in the usual Force Quit dialog box. Your next attempt, therefore, should be to open the Activity Monitor program (in Applications Utilities), which shows everything that's running. Double-click a program and then, in the resulting dialog box, click Quit to force quit it. (Unix hounds: You can also use the kill command in Terminal, as described on Section 17.3.)
Tip: If you find yourself having to quit the Dock more than once, here's an easier way: Make yourself a little AppleScript (Chapter 8) consisting of a single line: tell application "Dock" to quit . Save it as an application. Whenever you feel that the Dock needs a good kick in the rear, double-click your little AppleScript.
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Force quit remotely . If the Finder itself has locked up, you can't very well get to Activity Monitor (unless it occurred to you beforehand to stash its icon in your Dock ”not a bad idea). At this point, you may have to abort the locked program from another computer across the network, if you're on one, by using the SSH (secure shell) command. The end of Chapter 22 offers a blow-by-blow description of how you might terminate a program by remote control in this way, either from elsewhere on the office network or even from across the Internet.
Tip: If all of this seems like a lot to remember, you can always force-restart the Mac. On most recent Macs, you do that by holding down the power button for five seconds. If that doesn't work, press Control-c-power button.
WORKAROUND WORKSHOP
Fixing Permissions Problems | | Sooner or later, when you try to move, rename, or delete a certain file or folder, you may get an error message like this ”"The folder 'Junk' could not be opened because you do not have sufficient access privileges" ”or this: "The operation could not be completed because this item is owned by Chris" (or by root , which means by Mac OS X itself). What they're trying to say is, you've run into a permissions problem. As noted in Chapter 12, Mac OS X is designed to accommodate a number of different people who share the same Mac over time. Nobody is allowed to meddle with other people's files or folders. But even if you're the solo operator of your Mac, you still share it with Mac OS X itself (which the error messages may refer to as root or system ). In any case, if you're confident that whatever you're trying to do isn't some kind of nihilistic, self-destructive act like trashing the Applications folder, it's easy enough to get past these limitations. Just highlight the recalcitrant file or folder and then choose File Get Info. In its window, you'll find an Ownership&Permissions panel that lets you reassign ownership of any icon to, for example, yourself (if you have an Administrator account, that is). Make sure your permission is "Read&Write." (Just don't perform this surgery on files in the System folder.) Now you own that folder or file, and you can do whatever you like with it. |
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