macOS Terminal – How to Quit an App Using Terminal

command linemacosterminal

I want to quit certain applications on my Mac using Terminal. For example, how do I kill “Slack”? Do I need its PID number?

Best Answer

No, you do not need to know its PID.

You can use:

pkill -x Slack

Or:

killall Slack

Note: Be sure to read the manual page for whichever command you choose to use, in order to see the various options available to the command, as may be relevant to its particular usage. In Terminal type e.g. man pkill and press enter, or just type the command and right-click on it, then select: Open man Page

Related Solutions

MacOS – Deleting Saved Commands from Terminal

Mac OS does not store anything anywhere.

bash, which is the shell that is run in the terminal, does store the command history.

The terminal command history is stored in a hidden file in your user directory called .bash_history

This means the file is: /Users/{username}/.bash_history

You have to enable "Show System Files" to see it (from the "View" menu in finder).

The file is just a textual list of everything you type in the shell. You can open it in TextEdit, or your editor of choice.

You should probably close Terminal.app to flush any recent changes into the file before making changes, or it may get overwritten from a version Terminal.app has in memory.

MacOS – Bash Script that will start up second Terminal process

You can use the do script AppleScript command to run a command in a new Terminal window:

osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to do script "uptime"'

It doesn't start a second process or instance for Terminal though. On OS X there is typically only one instance for each application, even though you can use open -n to open another instance.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Deleting Saved Commands from Terminal

MacOS – Bash Script that will start up second Terminal process

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