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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: floop on Jan 10, '04 10:43:03PM

Be careful killing a process in Panther this way with fast user switching enabled. I find that using "ps aux | grep Finder" in Panther will return a line for each user that is logged-in. You wouldn't want to kill someone else's process. This is also a good reason not to use sudo if it is not needed.



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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: aranor on Jan 10, '04 11:51:28PM
Then remove the 'a' and just use ps ux. Why are you using the 'u' anyway, if you're just trying to get the PID? You don't need that extra info. In fact ps xc works even better, because it strips out the path info and just shows the command (i.e. Finder). And if you *just* want the PID if the Finder running for your own user, try ps xc | grep Finder | awk '{print $1}'

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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: biedawo on Jan 11, '04 01:34:53AM
awk has its own pattern matching functionality... ps xc | awk '/Finder/{print $1}' (although the hints to use killall or MacOSX built-in force-quit are probably better)

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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: aranor on Jan 11, '04 09:01:43AM

I never really got around to learning awk :) Maybe I should...



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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: phaedrus on Jan 12, '04 06:35:21AM

My spinning beachball experience in Panther makes this how-to-recover discussion worthless. Whenever the Finder decides to freeze ( beats me why it does so often), there is no way relaunching it. On my machine, that is. Kill the Finder and it will nerver return untill reboot. Becauce of it frequency it was forced to kill Panther's Finder permanent, and backed out to Jaguar. Why is the Finder doing this to me.



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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: aranor on Jan 12, '04 05:00:29PM

I will point out that most of the time the spinning beach-ball problem can be rectified just by waiting. It doesn't necessarily mean the application is frozen, it just means it's stopped accepting events for several seconds. It could just be really busy.

Anyway, the problem you describe makes it look like something was wrong with your installation. I suggest backing up all your important stuff, then doing a wipe and install of Panther and then restoring your stuff from backup.



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Recover from the Finder's spinning beachball
Authored by: phaedrus on Jan 14, '04 09:40:32AM

and thats what I did, but in order to find what caused it I booted from a firewire carboncopy of Jaguar. (excelent pice of shareware). Now I can reproduce a non-responding-finder in Jaguar as well, where waiting for spinning ball is not going to workout. It is only an example; I experienced others. This is how I did. Booting into Jaguar; mount a volume using samba smb://x.x.x.x . A fresh Virex.dmg download from .mac is waiting to be mouted there. Mounting this .dmg will never happen. Killing Disk Copy will work, but you'll endup in a non-responsive-finder. Relaunch finder means killing it until reboot. Running apps will keep on going, but launching is impossible.
Sure Finder can be in trouble sometimes, but why is it unable to recover ?



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