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is it possible to "end task" instead of "force quit"?

slipper

slipper

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
1,563
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is it possible to end task instead of force quit?

im looking up properties for a client of mine for approx 1 hour now and i selected all the properties that i want to email to her. all of a sudden i get the dreaded beach ball, ARG! is there a way to end task and keep the program running so i dont lose my information or is my only choice to force quit?
 
I am not sure exactly where you're getting the idea that "end task" would be helpful. The only "end task" I have heard of is on Windows and it's the equivalent of "force quit."
 
slipper said:
is it possible to end task instead of force quit?

im looking up properties for a client of mine for approx 1 hour now and i selected all the properties that i want to email to her. all of a sudden i get the dreaded beach ball, ARG! is there a way to end task and keep the program running so i dont lose my information or is my only choice to force quit?
Click to expand...

He's probably refering to the old Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Break in windows. This was hit or miss and all up to the software writer if they implemented this interrupt. Few things support it now though...

As for Apple options I don't know of anything, maybe Esc or something...
 
3-22 said:
He's probably refering to the old Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Break in windows. This was hit or miss and all up to the software writer if they implemented this interrupt. Few things support it now though...

As for Apple options I don't know of anything, maybe Esc or something...
Click to expand...
There's always the good old Cancel shortcut, Command-period. It works just about anywhere.
 
Well...

I remember, back in the Classic days, the [Command]+[.] (period) key combo. I think that would make an app try and stop doing its current task. It got me out of many a crash... ah, the good old days. I miss my PB 100 :(
I remember this in System 7, and maybe Mac OS 8. Can't remember ever using it in 9, and I'm almost definite that it doesn't work in X. Might be worth a try, I suppose. [ESC] might be a good bet, too. OS X is *nix based, so it might be possible to do all kinds of things from the terminal... only think I know how to do is kill stuff, but there might be something you can do... eh, I don't really know.
I'll just stop now, shall I? :rolleyes:
Oh, and isn't it odd that we say System 6 and 7 but not System 8 (it's Mac OS 8 and 9), and only infrequently say Mac OS X, preferring to say OS X? I suppose it's all in the way that Apple branded it...
Kirin
 
There is, so far as I know, no OS-level command to do that. There might theoretically be some way to use the terminal to kill a specific thread of a program, but even if there were it would almost certainly crash the whole program anyway.

Hitting command-period is pretty much your only hope; if the app hasn't actually crashed, that'll usually cancel the current operation and give you control back. If it doesn't work, the app is frozen, and you're out of luck anyway.

(Incidentally, there are some things that launch sub-programs to do work for them; for example, the weekly scripts run a series of cleanup commands. In these cases, the individual processes show up in the hierarchical view of Activity Monitor, and can be killed--I've done this to solve a runaway netstat process on my computer. But, there are few if any GUI apps that will have something like that going on behind the scenes, so this is more of an FYI than a helpful suggestion.)
 
slipper said:
is it possible to end task instead of force quit?

im looking up properties for a client of mine for approx 1 hour now and i selected all the properties that i want to email to her. all of a sudden i get the dreaded beach ball, ARG! is there a way to end task and keep the program running so i dont lose my information or is my only choice to force quit?
Click to expand...

Maybe you are overloading the app. Have you considered highlighting and dragging just the URLs onto a TextEdit page, saving the page for back up, then copying the URLs over to a new mail.If it still crashes, you still have the URLs in Textedit

Another way to mail and back up lots of jpgs is to install Imagewell, and drag each photo from a web page onto Imagewell where you can easily reduce the file and image size to manageable sizes. Drag the edited images onto the desktop, then drag (a copy is created) the images back onto your new mail.
 
I have since tried EscapePod and it seems to work for me. What is the problem that you are having with the program?
 
RiseAgainst said:
I have since tried EscapePod and it seems to work for me. What is the problem that you are having with the program?
Click to expand...

Like i said, it did not do anything it said it did. I did the keys and nothing happened.
 
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