Is there a way to halt an ongoing potentially problematic Finder action?

[IShouldnaDunDat]

I am fairly new to OS X, having ended an 8 year detour into Windows from more than a decade with older Macs. I am using a 6 month old 15" powerbook g4 1.67.

How do I halt a certain action that was mistakenly initiated in the finder? I have more than once not noticed until too late, that the process I initiated was opening dozens upon dozens of "get info" windows or far too many files "show in finder" windows. Admittedly, the right thing to do would be to pay more attention to what I am doing in the first place, never initiating the erroneous action, but, hey, at 3 am when my brain is fuzzy, funny things sometimes happen. Hitting the "Escape" key does not work, and usually I just have to wait until the process has finished doing what it is doing, then go about cleaning up the mess.

 

[Qion]

What you want would be really difficult to achieve unless you happened to turn into Fryke and typed a couple lines of code in Terminal (after launching it while the unwanted process was happening). The best workaround I can think of is relaunching Finder while the process is happening. Press Command+Option+Escape, click the Finder icon, and hit "Relaunch".

 

[nixgeek]

Also, if you hold down Option while clicking the Get Info windows all of them will close at the same time. Of course, if doing what you did slowed things down to a halt, then relaunching the Finder by force-quitting it would be the way to go.