How can the Task Manager in Windows or Force Quit in macOS close frozen, suspended, unresponding programs instantly. What do they do different than clicking the X button in the corner?
In: Technology
There are different levels of “quit program”. Nicest are “user has indicated they would like to see you leave” type, allowing the program the time to just make their exit at their own time, and they go from “pack your stuff” to just plain removing the process from the list of programs that get scheduled CPU time, and freeing all the RAM and other resources they had reserved, basically dissolving the program right then and there.
The only one that really is absolutely enforced is kill signal, the one that completely evaporates the program. Others are ones where there exists a tradition of what program should do upon receiving them, which usually involves closing the program, but the program is allowed to handle those by itself. There are default behaviors that tend to be in place unless programmer specifically wanted to override them, so you often get fairly uniform behavior. Especially the standard “press the X” functionality is very often something programmers make sure works as intended and as user expects, so you can expect that to work most reliably out of voluntary kill signals.
This answer is based on Linux tho. Macos should be similar as it’s a related operating system with these types of core features probably being identical, and even Windows seems to use a similar system under the hood, but I’m not sure if there are some less obvious differences that I should mention. On the surface it seems to work the same tho.
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