XP: kill a Windows process from the command line with taskkill

From the computer of: qmchenry

 

The ability to perform tasks from a system's command line allows those tasks to be used in batch files. This recipe describes several uses of taskkill to terminate Windows processes.

If you know the name of a process to kill, for example notepad.exe, use the following command from a command prompt to end it:

taskkill /IM notepad.exe

This will cause the program to terminate gracefully, asking for confirmation if there are unsaved changes. To forcefully kill the same process, add the /F option to the command line. Be careful with the /F option as it will terminate all matching processes without confirmation.

To kill a single instance of a process, specify its process id (PID). For example, if the desired process has a PID of 827, use the following command to kill it:

taskkill /PID 827

Using filters, a variety of different patterns can be used to specify the processes to kill. For example, the following filter syntax will forcefully kill all processes owned by the user Quinn:

taskkill /F /FI "USERNAME eq Quinn"

The following table shows the available filters and their use.

Filter Name   Valid Operators     Valid Value(s)
-----------   ---------------     --------------
STATUS        eq ne               RUNNING | NOT RESPONDING
IMAGENAME     eq ne               Image name
PID           eq ne gt lt ge le   PID value
SESSION       eq ne gt lt ge le   Session number.
CPUTIME       eq ne gt lt ge le   CPU time in the format
                                  of hh:mm:ss.
MEMUSAGE      eq ne gt lt ge le   Memory usage in KB
USERNAME      eq ne               User name in [domain\]user
                                        format
MODULES       eq ne               DLL name
SERVICES      eq ne               Service name
WINDOWTITLE   eq ne               Window title

   eq: equals                 ne: not equal
   gt: greater than           lt: less than
   gt: greater than or equal  le: less than or equal