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What is the ctrl-alt-del and does it exist in other OSs?

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jgpaiva:
For MacOS applications try Cmd/Alt/Escape
-Carol Haynes (July 11, 2012, 04:55 AM)
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Oooh~! A few goodies I didn't know before! :) Thanks!
-Renegade (July 11, 2012, 07:44 AM)
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You're right, I forgot to thank Carol, I think that will come in handy soon! :)
Thanks Carol!

40hz:
Look for the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel (or settings) available in most Linux distros. In Linux you can program virtually any key or key combo to do anything you want. 8)

jgpaiva:
Look for the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel (or settings) available in most Linux distros. In Linux you can program virtually any key or key combo to do anything you want. 8)
-40hz (July 11, 2012, 08:29 AM)
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I do understand that if I want to go through the hassle, I can make linux machines kill processes while doing backflips and eating bananas. :P
My question isn't so much related with how one can trigger the killing of processes, what I'm asking is if ctrl-alt-del has any "special treatment" in Windows (is it launched in a highest-priority-possible process?) that causes it to be more responsive than launching a regular process, and if so, if there's something (out of the box?) equivalent in other OSs. It seems to me that when I used Windows, my experience when trying to kill processes was much better. As a simple example, when my mac hangs up, just doing alt-tab to get to the process manager is a terrible pain that takes 10minutes, but I can't remember the Windows ctrl-alt-del taking 10minutes to answer (again, it may very well be that I just hate OSX so much that I'm creating false memories of the time I used Windows :) )

jgpaiva:
(I could have done this before  :-[) Just went to read up on wikipedia about it. Looks like linux has this cool stuff: Magic SysRq keyw, which appears to have a low level effect (kernel level) similar to ctrl-alt-del. In particular, sysreq + k seems to do something useful:
Kill all processes on the current virtual console (Can be used to kill X and svgalib programs, see below)
This was originally designed to imitate a Secure Access Key-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key#Commands
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40hz:
@jgpavia - On many PCs it also works as a hardware-based low-level system hook in BIOS. (Wait for your BIOS splash screen and then hit CTRL-ALT-DEL before your OS starts booting. Most PCs will do a hard reboot if you do.)

So the 'three finger salute' can operate on many different levels ranging from BIOS to kernal to OS depending on the machine and the OS.

It's one of those seemingly simple questions that doesn't have a simple answer once you get beyond "what it does" and start looking at exactly how it goes about doing it.

P.S. Thx for the Wikipedia link. It's a very good article. Much better in places than digging through actual manuals for the same info. :Thmbsup:

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