Unix command in terminal to kill a task in finder?

[GorillaPaws]

I've got a thumb drive that I think is kind of messed up. In the middle of transferring files over from the usb thumb-drive to the hard drive, it hangs. I'll click the "stop copying" button but it doesn't really do anything. I can't eject the drive cause it's in use, and if I try to do a force quit finder relaunch, then the finder locks up and I'll have to do a hard shutdown (holding down the power button).

Is there a magic unix command or something I can type into the terminal that will kill the copy from the usb drive to the hard drive task? Or even better, is there a task in the activity monitor that I can kill that will do the same thing (the terminal makes me kind of nervous...) without screwing anything up?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I'm going to chuck this drive, but I'd like to make sure I have all the data I need first.

 

[robbieduncan]

The finder runs as a single task. You can kill the whole thing or not at all. If you want to kill it just type:

killall Finder

The Finder will auto resart

 

[GorillaPaws]

The finder runs as a single task. You can kill the whole thing or not at all. If you want to kill it just type:

killall Finder

The Finder will auto resart

When I do this the finder hangs and won't relaunch (i.e. no icons on the desktop etc.) I can still switch between open apps, but essentially finder is frozen. If I ask to restart, all apps will quit normally until it gets to the finder which is frozen. At that point you can't really do anything besides a hard shutdown. There's really no way to force a reset of a usb drive or something?

 

[robbieduncan]

Well you could just yank the drive out. This will almost certainly damage the files on the USB drive though...

 

[GorillaPaws]

Well you could just yank the drive out. This will almost certainly damage the files on the USB drive though...

I think that's how I got myself into this situation in the first place lol. I'm just trying to salvage what I can from it, but if I'm going to have to do hard restarts over and over again to get as much of my data as I can, I'm gonna go crazy.

 

[bart rijksen]

When I do this the finder hangs and won't relaunch (i.e. no icons on the desktop etc.) I can still switch between open apps, but essentially finder is frozen. If I ask to restart, all apps will quit normally until it gets to the finder which is frozen. At that point you can't really do anything besides a hard shutdown. There's really no way to force a reset of a usb drive or something?

Try going down to the dock, and clicking on the Finder symbol. That fixed it for me.