Summary

Open Activity Monitor and find the process you want to kill by sorting by resource usage or by process ID. Then click the X button at the top of Activity Monitor and select either “Quit” or “Force Quit” to kill the process.

Is an application or process causing problems on your Mac? Rid yourself of the problem app by killing it using Activity Monitor or the Terminal. you’re able to also find and kill processes that are using specific ports on your Mac.

Find running processes on macOS using Activity Monitor

How to Kill a Mac Process Using Activity Monitor

The easiest way to find and kill a process that’s causing an issue in macOS is to launch Activity Monitor. You cando this using Spotlight(hit Command+Spacebar then start typing “activity” and hit Enter when you see the app) or by finding and launching the app under the Applications > Utilities folder.

Activity Monitor has severalviews you can use to isolate problems. On the CPU tab, you can see which apps are using the most processing power right now (sort by the “% CPU” tab to see the hungriest processes. You can also use “Memory” to sort by RAM usage, “Energy” to findwhich apps are using the most power, “Disk” to sort by disk usage, and “Network” to sort by data sent and received.

Search macOS processes that match “Safari” in Activity Monitor

On top of this, you can use the “Search” box in the top-right corner to search for a process name. You can find the core process and associated processes this way, for example searching for Safari will find the core app, networking processes, individual tabs, extensions, and more.

Find the process you would like to kill and then click on the “X” button in the top-right left corner of the screen. You can then choose between “Quit” and “Force Quit” to attempt to send a quit command (to give the process time to save your data) or a force quit command (to kill the process immediately, ideal if it’s crashed). Find out processes that are safe to kill on your Mac.

Quit macOS process using Activity Monitor

How to Kill a Mac Process Using Terminal

It’s also possible to kill processes from the command line using Terminal on your Mac. To do this, first launch Terminal (either using Spotlight or from the Applications > Utilities folder) and run the

command to see a list of running processes. Alternatively, usethe

List running processes by PID in macOS Terminal

command to see a list of processes along with theprocess ID(or PID for short).

You’ll need the PID to kill a process, but trawling through hundreds of processes can be a chore. Fortunately, we can identify processes using the

List processes that match “Safari” in Terminal

command, where AppName is the name of the application you want to find.

For example, typing

List processes using a port on your Mac with the lsof Terminal command

will return a list of processes with “Safari” in the title. Be aware that this command is case-sensitive, so searching for “steam” will return different results to “Steam”

Take note of the PID number next to the process you want to kill, then kill it by running the

Force Quit a macOS app using the context menu

command. For example,

. To kill a process immediately (also known as force quit) use

instead.

You can also kill a process using its name with the

command, for example

. This will kill all processes with “Safari” in the name (again, processes are case-sensitive).

How to Kill a Mac Process on a Specific Port

If you need to kill a process that’s using a particularnetwork porton your Mac, you’ll first need to find out which process is using that port. Fortunately, this is easy to do using Terminal. The command differs depending on which version of macOS you’re using.

For modern Mac computers (including Apple Silicon models) running macOS El Capitan or later, use the

command, for example:

to find the process that’s occupying port 51413. On older Mac computers you’re able to use

, for example:

to find the process on port 51413.

Once you have the PID, you’re able to then end it using the

command as outlined above. If you’re using

, you can immediately kill a process based on the port it is using with the

command, where

is the port in question.

How to Force Quit Apps in the Dock

If the process you want to quit is an app in your dock, you canforce close itwhich should kill it even if it has crashed and become unresponsive. To do this, find the app in your dock andright-click(or control-click) then hold the “Option” key on your keyboard and choose “Force Quit” at the bottom of the list.

you may force quit anything, whether it has crashed or not, but you’re more likely to lose unsaved progress by doing so. If you find that you frequently need to do this, learnhow to troubleshoot crashing apps on your Mac.