I recently ran out of hard drive space while ripping DVDs. The resulting lack of Virtual Memory caused Mac OSX to “pause” several applications. Once I freed up some additional space, I wanted to unpause them, but was unsure how.
As it turns out, the solution is very simple, though it requires a bit of UNIX magic. For starters launch the Terminal app. Next, find the process in question using the ps command, as follows:
ps -ax | grep Word
This will return a list of processes with “Word” in their name. Find the relevant process (for me there was just one – Microsoft Word) and look at the first number in that row of the list. This is the process ID (PID).
To revive that process, issue the following kill command:
kill -CONT ###
Where ### is the PID. The application in question should once again be accessible.
Alternatively, you could force quit and relaunch the application, but doing so could cause you to lose whatever you working on.
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
thank you!!!!
THANK YOU SO MUCH! if it wasn’t for this, i would’ve lost exactly 20 hours of work!!!
all love and respect for you.
peace.
Thank you so much!!! Almost lost a whole lot of work: alternately the PID is listed if you open the activity monitor
Thanks for sharing this – a big help!
It worked! Fantastic! Thanks!
this just saved my work! thank you!
When I typed in the command I received this message
Gen-Sekiguchi:~ gensekiguchi$ ill – CONT 35852
-bash: ill: command not found
What did I miss?
B
You missed the K in kill, and there shouldn’t be a space between the hyphen and the CONT:
kill -CONT 12345
THANK YOU!! You saved my bacon. I couldn’t find the PID using Terminal, but the Activity Monitor got me to the right place and them the kill code worked it’s magic. I was having a cow over here and now am as happy as a clam. I also stood to lose 20 hours of work! Ugh. THANK YOU!!
Just what I needed to help a customer with a project. We definitely did not want to force quit. Thank you!
Worked like a charm. Photoshop had paused in the middle of the saving process, and I’m so relived to not lose all that work. Thanks for the tip.
I could kiss you right now!! Thank you!!!
Thank you! Very helpful
I love you!
Dude, you saved me from deleting a very complex after effects project. YOU ARE AWESOME!
This killed photoshop for me… lost hours of work. Do not use with photoshop.
AMAZING. Worked perfectly and saved me a TON of time. Thanks so much!
Thanks for the more detailed code writing. I saw this trick elsewhere but not as clear as yours. I had this huge movie poster file in Photoshop, just finished some major changes and clean up and wanted to add that one last “wafer thin mint” item when I was paused and it wouldn’t wake up for nothing. Activity Monitor trick didn’t work, but this did after 30 scary seconds.
thank you!
Thank you. so helpful
Thanks a lot! It worked for me! Photoshop continued saving
HALLELUJAH!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH! This has saved me!
THANK YOU! What a life saver
Thank you sooooo much! I had about 40 tabs open that I would have lost with a force quit if it weren’t for this.
you are an angel. thank you for saving several hours worth of work.
Thank you soooo much
literally saved my essay!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCHHHHHHH