How to Use the Mac Terminal’s Hidden Task Manager to See Background Processes

You’re exiting a Terminal window because when you do that you will terminate a running process. and sure it is confusing because you wasn’t  know anything is still running at all or not.

There are all kinds of reasons an application might be running in the background in a Terminal window, and it might not be a good idea to close the window while one is running, at least not without finding out what’s going on.

This tutorial will explain how you can use the terminal hidden task manager to see your background process and able to end it.

1. Open the Terminal by searching for it in your MAC.

2. Press “Command+I” to bring up the Inspector. If you haven’t a Mac keyboard you can click Shell > Show Inspector in the menu bar.

3. Under “Running Processes” table you can see all the running processes of your MAC.

4. To close a given process, right-click its name in the list, then go to Signal Process Group and click Kill.

5. Now you have the ability to see what’s running in the background and also able to end its process.

Summary

After this tutorial you should able to know how you can use the mac terminal hidden task manager to see a background process and also able to end the process safely through the shell inspector.

Miguel

I started this tech blog back in 2011 as a place to write down processes I took to fix my client systems and network. Now I write some tips and tricks to help others with the tech issues that one might encounter.

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