How to Kill an Application

Some Mac applications are running like background services. For example Growl, EverNote and Dropbox. The only interface is at top right menu bar. The problem is that sometimes their interface or context menu are not available; as a result, there is no way to quit the application. My Dropbox has this problem after a while.

I tried to use Mac Force Quit... from Apple menu, but I could not find them. Fortunately, there is an alternative way to do it. Here are the steps to do:

• Open Terminal
• Type command: ps -A |grep Drop. You will see Dropbox application process id(pid), time and application location.
• Type the command to kill the Dropbox: kill [pid].

All those ps and kill commands are most commonly used UNIX commands.