Any way to write a Windows .bat file to kill processes?

Question

Every time I turn on my company-owned development machine, I have to kill 10+ processes using the Task Manager or any other process management app just to get decent performance out of my IDE. Yes, these are processes from programs that my company installs on my machine for security and compliance. What I'd like to do is have a .bat file or script of some kind with which I can kill the processes in question.

Does anybody know how to do this?

This should be handy also when in an automation environment and a run away subprocess needs to be terminated if it fails to finish or respond in a decent amount of time. — Danny Staple, Jun 17 '15 at 15:46
I posted this question link to all my direct colleages because we are roundabout 20 S/W developers in a company with roundabout 2000 engineers (doing CAD). We are permanently struggling with the IT administration department because (due to security policy) we are nearly unable to do our work... (It doesn't help technically but it's nice to hear that other S/W developers seem to have similar problems.) — Scheff's Cat, May 14 '17 at 08:11

score 223 · Accepted Answer · edited May 30 '20 at 01:28

223

You can do this with 'taskkill'. With the /IM parameter, you can specify image names.

Example:

taskkill /im somecorporateprocess.exe

You can also do this to 'force' kill:

Example:

taskkill /f /im somecorporateprocess.exe

Just add one line per process you want to kill, save it as a .bat file, and add in your startup directory. Problem solved!

If this is a legacy system, PsKill will do the same.

edited May 30 '20 at 01:28

Nith

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answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:14

Factor Mystic

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I had success using `taskkill /F /IM /T` to force closing of *all* processes by their name. – Benj Aug 19 '15 at 09:15
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not work on win10 for kill backgrounds process. all background process in win 10 named `RuntimeBroker.exe` and when try kill nothing happened. – Mostafa Jun 15 '18 at 08:58

score 114 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:13

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taskkill /f /im "devenv.exe"

this will forcibly kill the pid with the exe name "devenv.exe"

equivalent to -9 on the nix'y kill command

answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:13

DevelopingChris

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It didn't work until I added the /f flag to the command. Thank you! – Denis M. Kitchen Jan 31 '13 at 16:35
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This will kill **ALL** entries with the provided name. Particularly handy when a program backfires and opens notepad.exe 1000 times in the background :] \*ahem\* – Richard de Wit Feb 05 '14 at 14:10

npocmaka · Answer 3 · 2020-01-24T09:31:11.193

As TASKKILL might be unavailable on some Home/basic editions of windows here some alternatives:

TSKILL processName

or

TSKILL PID

Have on mind that processName should not have the .exe suffix and is limited to 18 characters.

Another option is WMIC :

wmic Path win32_process Where "Caption Like 'MyProcess%.exe'" Call Terminate

wmic offer even more flexibility than taskkill with its SQL-like matchers .With wmic Path win32_process get you can see the available fileds you can filter (and % can be used as a wildcard).

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 29 '08 at 03:18

I'm assuming as a developer, you have some degree of administrative control over your machine. If so, from the command line, run msconfig.exe. You can remove many processes from even starting, thereby eliminating the need to kill them with the above mentioned solutions.

score 5 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 29 '08 at 03:45

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Get Autoruns from Mark Russinovich, the Sysinternals guy that discovered the Sony Rootkit... Best software I've ever used for cleaning up things that get started automatically.

answered Aug 29 '08 at 03:45

Brian Stewart

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score 4 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:12

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Download PSKill. Write a batch file that calls it for each process you want dead, passing in the name of the process for each.

answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:12

Shog9

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score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:33

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Use Powershell! Built in cmdlets for managing processes. Examples here (hard way), here(built in) and here (more).

answered Aug 29 '08 at 02:33

slipsec

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score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Oct 26 '16 at 12:32

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Please find the below logic where it works on the condition.

If we simply call taskkill /im applicationname.exe, it will kill only if this process is running. If this process is not running, it will throw an error.

So as to check before takskill is called, a check can be done to make sure execute taskkill will be executed only if the process is running, so that it won't throw error.

tasklist /fi "imagename eq applicationname.exe" |find ":" > nul

if errorlevel 1 taskkill /f /im "applicationname.exe"

answered Oct 26 '16 at 12:32

Sarath Subramanian

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easier to just redirect the error message of `taskkill`to `nul` – Stephan Oct 26 '16 at 12:39
I add a very small edit in the end and it works like a charm: tasklist /fi "imagename eq applicationname.exe" |find ":" > nul if errorlevel 1 taskkill /f /im "applicationname.exe" > null – techsystem2000 Oct 24 '21 at 04:37

score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Feb 12 '18 at 21:58

Here I wrote an example command that you can paste in your cmd command line prompt and is written for chrome.exe.

FOR /F "tokens=2 delims= " %P IN ('tasklist /FO Table /M "chrome*" /NH') DO (TASKKILL /PID %P)

The for just takes all the PIDs listed on the below tasklist command and executes TASKKILL /PID on every PID

tasklist /FO Table /M "chrome*" /NH

If you use the for in a batch file just use %%P instead of %P

Any way to write a Windows .bat file to kill processes?

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