OS X: Temporarily pause active applications

For purposes of this example, assume it’s Safari you’d like to pause. In the Terminal, type this command:

ps -ax | grep Safari

The ps -ax portion of the command lists all processes, just to make sure you see everything. The pipe symbol (the vertical bar) then passes this list of processes to grep, which searches for the string Safari. By using grep, we won’t have to look at the output for the processes we don’t care about. The output of this command should look something like this:

6537 ?? S 20:05.19 /Applications/Safari.app ... 0_51642369 8932 p1 S+ 0:00.01 grep Safari

The process ID is the first number in the output—6537 in this case. To temporarily pause Safari, just type:

kill -STOP 6537

When you’re done, switch back to the Terminal, and type:

kill -CONT 6537

(from MacWorld.com)

06 October 2005  |   permalink