The
Mac has three 'salutes' you can make when the system
freezes or hangs.
First, a force
reboot is
Command-
Control-
PowerKey. This (hopefuly) reboots your machine (just like if you'd selected '
restart'). As
ryano pointed out, though, this has become much less effective recently than it once was.
Second, a
force quit is
Command-
Option-
Escape (not
Command-
Control-
Escape!). This pops up a
dialog box asking if you want to force quit an
application. Usualy this won't fare too well, either, if you're
badly frozen or hung, but can be useful if you need to quit an application when it wouldn't normaly be possible.
Third, a soft
interrupt key is
Command-
PowerKey. On older machines, there was an actual
interrupt button on the machine, but I don't think they have them any more. Anyway, it will pop up a
dialog similar to the Force Quit dialog, but it will just have a little
prompt in it. If you type 'G F' (gee space eff), and hit
return, it will
force quit the application if you aren't too badly frozen. This usualy has a higher rate of success than
Command-
Option-
Escape.
If you have a
debugger, (read:
MacsBug),
Command-
PowerKey will boot you into that.
MacsBug can almost always recover from anything but a
really nasty crash, but is fairly complicated to use. It is, after all, a
programmer's tool.
It is "
crucial" to note that while the Force Reboot does require three
fingers, it is strange to see either of the others preformed with three fingers -- the interrupt key obviously requires two, and Force Quit can be affected with only a
thumb on the
Command and
Option keys, and an extended finger to the
Escape key.