Force Quitting apps does not totally kill them

The next step is to try to shutdown using Terminal: open it and type

sudo shutdown -r now

and enter your administrator password (you won't see it as you do so) at the prompt.

When it works it will shut everything down cleanly and restart, though I have seen instances where this won't work either.

If you do have to do a switch-off you should do a Disk Repair: the easiest way is to install AppleJack and run it on the next boot, in single-user mode. My experience is that forced shutdowns always leave some disk directory damage, and if you keep doing this without repairing you may run into more serious problems.

(AppleJack is quite safe: it's simply a basic interface to access built-in Unix processes which you would otherwise access by typing in obscure commands).

Have you tried force quiting from within activity monitor rather than the finder? If not in terminal type "top" (without quotation marks). This will give you a list of processes similar to activity monitor which in theory should let you know if the applications really are active. If they are note the process id (PID) and type kill
then the number
eg. if I wanted to force quit itunes i would type "kill 996"

3381 top 10.6% 0:03.41 1 18 29 752K 200K 1344K 18M
3369 bash 0.0% 0:00.01 1 14 19 364K 184K 1004K 18M
3368 login 0.0% 0:00.14 1 17 55 460K 188K 1232K 19M
3367 Terminal 0.7% 0:05.12 3 99 158 4248K 9984K 10M 366M
3349 mdworker 0.0% 0:00.62 4 71 43 852K 3128K 3532K 33M
2290 LaunchCFMA 0.1% 2:19.97 5 134 367 52M 23M 73M 658M
2278 CrashRepor 0.0% 0:00.14 1 60 106 1088K 4044K 3644K 328M
2277 Capture On 0.0% 0:42.32 23 236 945 214M 12M 231M 625M
1816 Little Sni 0.0% 0:13.66 4 102 207 2796K 11M 11M 382M
1480 Adobe LM S 0.0% 0:12.37 3 68 192 2524K 2488K 6344K 135M
1476 Adobe Phot 2.9% 98:10.25 10 172 3695 141M 55M 227M 1435M
996 iTunes 0.0% 15:37.50 12 248 427 5512K 12M 17M 419M

If this doesn't work there are ways to escalate the command which i can't recall offhand.

If the app doesn't appear in this list i'd guess its an issue with the dock. Find the dock plist in users>"you">library>preferences it will be called something like com.apple.dock.plist. Drag it to the desktop and restart the finder. I'd second the idea of applejack. an excellent program in my experience.

If not in terminal type "top" (without quotation marks).

To be absolutely (and probably unnecessarily) clear:

If not, in terminal type "top" (without quotation marks).

what is it or OS X doing for all that time?

Meditating.



Ommmmmmmmmm.......

maybe, but in terms of force quiting a process through terminal its a pretty necessary step. Force quitting a process is in many cases a much better solution than simply restarting the whole mac - especially if another program is in the middle of something. Its also a lot quicker.