TASKKILL command line Tutorial

Open up an Administrative level Command Prompt and run tasklist to see all of the
running processes:

C:\>tasklist

Image Name PID Session Name Mem Usage

========================= ======== ================ ============
firefox.exe 26356 Console 139,352 K
regedit.exe 24244 Console 9,768 K
cmd.exe 18664 Console 2,380 K
conhost.exe 2528 Console 7,852 K
notepad.exe 17364 Console 7,892 K
notepad.exe 24696 Console 22,028 K
notepad.exe 25304 Console 5,852 K
explorer.exe 2864 Console 72,232 K

In the example above you can see the image name and the PID for each process. If you
want to kill the firefox process run:

C:\>Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F

or

C:\>Taskkill /PID 26356 /F

The /f flag is kills the process forcefully. Failure to use the /F flag will result in nothing
happening in some cases. One example is whenever I want to kill the explorer.exe process
I have to use the /F flag or else the process just does not terminate.

If you have multiple instances of an image open such as multiple firefox.exe processes,
running the taskkill /IM firefox.exe command will kill all instances. When you specify the
PID only the specific instane of firefox will be terminated.

The real power of taskkill are the filtering options that allow you to use the following
variables and operators.

Variables:

 STATUS

 IMAGENAME
 PID
  SESSION
 CPUTIME
 MEMUSAGE
 USERNAME
 MODULES
 SERVICES
 WINDOWTITLE

Operators:

 eq (equals)
 ne (not equal)
 gt (greater than)
 lt (less than)
 ge (greater than or equal)
 le (less than or equal)

"*" is the wildcard.

You can use the variables and operators with the /FI filtering flag. For example, let's say
you want to end all processes that have a window title that starts with "Internet":

C:\>taskkill /FI "WINDOWTITLE eq Internet*" /F

How about killing all processes running under the Steve account:

C:\>taskkill /FI "USERNAME eq Steve" /F

It is also possible to kill a process running on a remote computer with taskkill. Just run the
following to kill notepad.exe on a remote computer called SteveDesktop:

C:\>taskkill /S SteveDesktop /U RemoteAccountName /P RemoteAccountPasswor

d /IM notepad.exe /F

To learn more about taskkill run it with the /? command just like any other Windows
command.