How to stop a process in Terminal

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Ending a process in unix instead of interrupting it

When I task in Terminal, such as ping blah.com, how do I then stop this task (other than closing the Terminal window. In Windows, you can Ctrl+Break pretty much any terminal based process, but I can't figure out the way to do it on the Mac.

Solution 1

Ctrl + C

Ctrl + C is a the standard *nix way of signaling a process to abort.

Solution 2

Try Ctrl + C. Also, Ctrl + Z might help if you want to suspend a process.

For further information, man kill.

If you're curious about the difference between suspend and terminate, this answer is a good starting point; the TL;DR version is, a suspended process can be resumed later and its execution can continue. A terminated (and killed) process will be gone.

Comments

[Admin]

This was useful to me coming from Linux. I had no idea Ctrl+Break was what I needed on Windows :)

[Kyle Bridenstine]

My Mac just beeps at me when I try this.

[Wizard of Kneup]

Mr. Tea: are you using Command instead of Control?

[Pacerier]

@heavyd, Why does man use q instead of ctrlC to quit? What's the rationale?

[heavyd]

@Pacerier, I can't really say why, you'd have to talk to the developers to figure that out. Processes can capture the Ctrl + C signal and do something else if they choose, but by default the behavior of Ctrl + C is abort the process.

[Abhinav Saxena]

Ctrl + c does not work on zsh, MacOS Catalina.

[Abhinav Saxena]

Ctrl + c or ctrl + z does not work on zsh, MacOS Catalina.

[Brian D]

Command + . is how you do it in Mac Terminal

[Leo Caseiro]

Try CMD + (.) period/dot

[Chris]

CMD + (.) period/dot works!