Relaunch the Mac OS X Dock

June 14, 2011 · by nathan · in

Problem

On my Snow Leopard machine this kept happening.

  • The “open” indicator (glowing silver ball under the app icon) in the Dock was flaky, only showing for a few apps though more were running.
  • The task switcher (which you see when you option-tab/alt-tab) didn’t show all running apps. That RUINS it for me. I always use option-tab.
  • I hate rebooting.

Workaround–Restart the Dock process.

Open Terminal† and use one command:

killall -HUP Dock

Don’t be afraid of “killall”. HUP means “Hang Up” and is the normal way of telling something to relaunch.

Thanks to AcmeTech’s old post.

† Terminal is located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Or the quick Spotlight way is command-space, Terminal.

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