Today we’ll go over the various methods to kill a process. Can be useful especially if the process is stuck somehow and you’re having trouble closing/killing it.
Kill process with WMI queries
Open cmd.exe and run command:
wmic process where name='myprocessname.exe' delete
Batch kill in command prompt
Open cmd.exe and run command:
taskkill /IM "myprocessname" /T /F
/IM is required to pick process, but the extra parameters /T and /F are optional. They’re quite useful though:
/T = also kills child processes
/F = force termination of your process
Kill it the powerful way
Indeed. You can also kill it using Powershell, but you need to find the process ID first. Open Powershell prompt and simply type
Get-Process myprocessname | Select -expand id
# use the id returned in the next command:
kill -id id
Kill process using graphical user interface
You’re probably familiar with Task Manager. Open it by right-clicking on the taskbar and click on “Task Manager”. If that fails, or if you need to run it as another user, you can browse to %windir%\system32\
and run the executable file, taskmgr.exe
.
If you’re lucky you can just kill the process and get on with your life. But, if you want to figure out what’s wrong, then a great tip is to open the Resource Monitor and Filter by process. This will show you all disk I/O file handles related to your process so you might actually see what exactly is hanging.