Force Quit

Jliu750 · April 15, 2018

What exactly is force quit, and why does it exist?

iRileyx · April 15, 2018

The clue is in the name, it forces a program or window to close. If a program freezes and you can't use the x to close it, you can force close it instead.

On Mac it even tells you in the window what its use is.

GoodBytes · April 16, 2018

22 minutes ago, Jliu750 said:

What exactly is force quit, and why does it exist?

They are several Quit command for a program. The 2 common ones, are: "Graceful quit', and 'Force quit".

Graceful quit is when you his the 'X" button to close the program. The program gets the call, and can decide to do things, like unload the project, clean up temp files, and then close. Or show you the "Do you want to Save?" dialogue box and threat the answer you pick (save, will save the file).

Force quit, is when the OS comes in and stop the program from running. It doesn't care if the program was doing super sensitive stuff or not, you said to the OS to Force quit the program, the OS will no longer process the program terminating it immediately.

wasab · April 16, 2018

31 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

They are several Quit command for a program. The 2 common ones, are: "Graceful quit', and 'Force quit".

Graceful quit is when you his the 'X" button to close the program. The program gets the call, and can decide to do things, like unload the project, clean up temp files, and then close. Or show you the "Do you want to Save?" dialogue box and threat the answer you pick (save, will save the file).

Force quit, is when the OS comes in and stop the program from running. It doesn't care if the program was doing super sensitive stuff or not, you said to the OS to Force quit the program, the OS will no longer process the program terminating it immediately.

What if OS itself is misbehaving? Do you must hard reboot to force quit?

GoodBytes · April 16, 2018

29 minutes ago, wasab said:

What if OS itself is misbehaving? Do you must hard reboot to force quit?

Yes and No.

I mean modern OSs are very complicated piece of Software with layers and many components, with built-in monitoring system monitoring these components for failure. Usually if something in the OS is 'misbehaving' as you put it, and nothing is being done by the OS other layers, or can't, than it can be recovered via restarting the process. But usually the system will BSOD from a unrecoverable situation, if it fails to recover itself or can't (for example: hardware itself froze, OS can't do anything. Power needs to be cut.. so it BSOD, and restarts the systems. CPU might be stuck in an infinite loop due to an elevated process such a process running as Real Time to driver or hardware fault does requests continuously, at rapid rate blocking everything, making the system unable to BSOD, and just freezes. Although rare, especially in modern OSs of today, and fancier hardware design, grid locks are possible, and while moderns OSs have a lot in place to avoid them, everything is possible, and it can happen. Also, remember that consumer hardware is only ~95-97% reliable. Server grade are ~99% (hence the premium price as no shortcut circuitry are done, no cheeping out on components anywhere, correction system put everywhere, including stuff like ECC memory (and of course the cost of more 'premium' support added, and much increase profit margins on the hardware), anyway). So you can fall into a situation where the OS is not the problem but the hardware or the driver is.