10.6: A workaround for an apparent low disk space bug

Oct 22, '09 07:30:22AM

Contributed by: mafoo

Snow Leopard only hintThere seems to be a bug in 10.6 (including 10.6.1) that I stumbled on when I ran out of disk space.

The OS popped up the usual Free up disc space and/or force quit some applications warning. After freeing up over a gigabyte of space, and clicking the Resume button, nothing happened -- the app(s) remained paused. I deleted another four gigabytes worth of files on the disk, but to no avail. The only option seemed to be to force quit the apps.

The fix is fairly simple:

  1. Free up some disk space, or close some of the memory hogging apps that aren't paused so you can save your work.
  2. Open up Activity Monitor and find the paused processe(s). Their entries will be red so they are easy to spot, and they'll say (Not Responding) beside their names.
  3. Note the process ID (PID) of the offending application(s);
  4. Open up Terminal.app, and type kill -CONT processid, where processid is the number you noted earlier, then press Return.
This will return your frozen apps to your control, ready to save and quit your work.

[robg adds: I can't confirm the out-of-disk-space-bug, but this hint discusses how to pause and resume apps from Terminal using the kill command.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091005184322621