Kill process from command line (CMD)

by admin on August 10, 2010

We can kill a process from GUI using Task manager. If you want to do the same from command line., then taskkill is the command you are looking for. Using this command we can kill a process by specifying either the process id or the image file name.

Kill a process using image name:

We can kill all the processes running a specific executable using the below command.

taskkill /IM executablename

Example:
Kill all processes running mspaint.exe:

c:\>taskkill /IM mspaint.exe
SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "mspaint.exe" with PID 1972.

Kill a process forcibly

In some cases, we need to forcibly kill applications. For example, if we try to to kill Internet explorer with multiple tabs open, tasklist command would ask the user for confirmation. We would need to add /F flag to kill IE without asking for any user confirmation.

taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe

/F : to forcibly kill the process. If not used, in the above case it will prompt the user if the opened pages in tabs need to be saved.

Kill a process by using process id:

We can use below command to kill a process using process id(pid).

taskkill /PID  processId

Example:
Kill a process with pid 1234.

taskkill /PID 1234

Kill processes consuming high amount of memory

taskkill /FI "memusage gt value"

For example, to kill processes consuming more than 100 MB memory, we can run the below command

taskkill /FI "memusage gt 102400"

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