[philsnow]

"then reboot. It's extreme, but it has the best chance of getting your processes shut down cleanly as opposed to a kill"

so... how do reboots work on OS X ? on every *nix flavor I know, there's one command that just halts the damn machine and damn the torpedoes, and there's one command that does it more gracefully, by sending progressively harder-to-ignore signals to ~every process except init, ending up on SIGKILL (which is not trappable).

[Moto7451]

A standard reboot from the GUI should be fine. If you boot up in verbose mode there are some amusing messages that are displayed at the top of the screen during reboot/shut down when a program has to be force quit by the OS.