It can sometimes be necessary to kill a process in Mac OSX. We’ve all tried it.
To kill a process or program in the Mac OSX Leopard / Snow leopard / Lion do the following commands
ps -A | grep [name of program you want to close]
This will give you the number of the processes found (if any). Now just close them with this command
kill -9 [process id]
So, for example to kill my activity monitor program
ps -A | grep activity 39049 ?? 0:01.81 /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/activitymonitord kill -9 39049