Migrating from Linux to OSX: finder

Showing posts with label finder. Show all posts

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Useful processes to kill in OSX

From time to time, some of user interface or system process go crazy or freeze. It's always good to know how to kill and restart those processes them without restarting the system.

Frozen Finder: Kill it. Restarts by itself
> sudo killall Finder

Frozen Spotlight: Kill it. Restarts by itself
> sudo killall SystemUIServer

mDNSResponder sometimes gets stuck (observed in 10.5 and 10.6) and as it does so the system-wide name resolving stops working. Meaning that internet names are not resolved anymore
> sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
> sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
or ometimes it also works to kill it and restarts by itself
> sudo killall mDNSResponder

If mds goes crazy indexing some new volume: Stop it:
> sudo mdutil -i off /path_to_volume
or stop it on all volumes with:
> sudo mdutil -a -i off

... any other?

Sources:
http://superuser.com/questions/231517/how-can-i-quit-frozen-spotlight-without-rebooting-my-computer
http://linuxtoosx.blogspot.fr/2011/10/restart-mdnsresponder.html
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3789#

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Symbolic links and aliases

Aliases* and symbolic links do essentially the same thing but behave differently, one of the main problems with the formers (alias) is that they cannot be navigated from the terminal. On the other hand symbolic links can be navigated both from the terminal and Finder. Fortunately there is a way to create symbolic links in the Finder via AppleScript.

(*) The aliases behave like hard links, the source file can be moved but the alias always points to the same filesystem object. But they are more powerful than a hard link, with an alias you can link a folder or an object in another filesystem.