Is there a way to list—and kill—running processes on Mac OS X in a Windows “Ctrl+Alt+Delete”-like way?
Problem
So, what do you do on a Mac when a process (as opposed to an application) is hogging CPU, swamping your machine, and you need to kill it? I know you can use or open “Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor” and kill it from there. But what happens when the process is already using so much CPU that doing either of those tasks is impossible? On Windows, you can just do ctrl+alt+delete and the process list will reliably open. So no matter how much your computer is thrashing, you always have access to the list of processes. On Mac OS, there’s cmd+alt+escape, which reliably shows running applications. Fine when it’s an application causing the problem. But: what do you do if it’s a process?
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Fix for: Is there a way to list—and kill—running processes on Mac OS X in a Windows “Ctrl+Alt+Delete”-like way?
Based on your desire to kill an individual process, I'm assuming that you are ok with a solution at the Terminal. The Terminal is pretty light so should be responsive even if your system is swamped, or if you're logging in via ssh. Beyond the basic command, which kills processes via their (which you'd need to get from either a command, or the Activity monitor), a neat trick at the terminal is the command, which allows you to kill a process by name rather than pid. For example, if you know the n…
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