Forcing a program to quit

If you have a program that you must quit, and you are not worried about losing data (this means either that you have saved your work, or that you have accepted that it is inevitable that you will lose data), hold the Command, Option, and Escape keys at the same time. A dialog box should appear, allowing the choice to "Force Quit" or to "Cancel".
At this time, press the Force Quit button.

If no dialog box appeared in the first place, and the Macintosh is still frozen, or if the "Force Quit" button simply turned black and nothing happened beyond that, then you should try to force quit once again, and, that failing, reboot the Macintosh.

On the other hand, if you were successful, you should immediately save all your recoverable work, and restart the computer normally, as from the Finder.

If the Taskman extension is installed, hold the Control and Escape keys so that a dialog box comes up, select the application that has crashed, and use the button provided to quit it.


James Dooley / jdooley@ugcs.caltech.edu