Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball

Jan 10, '04 09:15:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I got fed up of the old spinning beach-ball problem with a DVD that I had just inserted, so I thought I'd try something better than a reboot. You need to sudo to root for this one to work. Once you've done that, then type:

 % ps aux| grep Finder.app
Get the process ID (the first set of numbers in the output) and then type:
 % kill -HUP 1234
Replace 1234 with the actual process ID of the Finder from the first command. This will re-initialise Finder and gets rid of the beach-ball. BTW, this was on 10.2.4, so some of these Finder bugs are probably fixed, buts it's a tip worth knowing.

[robg adds: When the Finder locks up on me (hasn't happened yet in 10.3), I just use Command-Option-Escape to force it to re-launch; this works without requiring a trip to the Terminal. You may, however, have to switch from the Finder to another app before the Command-Option-Escape key sequence will be recgonized.]

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