Tasklist andTaskkill ~ A Command line equivalent Task Manager utility.

[arvind_kumar]

Taskkill ~ A Command line utility equivalent of its GUI i.e. Task Manager

Almost all of us came across of situation when Windows Task Manager becomes disabled due to some malware or virus or some other infectious code. At that time we can’t get the details about the processes running and have to take help of some 3rd party tools in order to kill the application or process which is running in background and creating problem in computer system. Instead of using any 3rd party tool we can also play a hand on a command line utility already present in Windows Command Prompt’s command list.

This utility is called as Tasklist and Taskkill.

Tasklist is a utility which lists out the currently running processes either on a local computer or on a remote machine. We can easily check which processes are running in background unwillingly and then to terminate such processes we can use Taskkill (explained after tasklist).

Syntax:

tasklist [/s <computer> [/u [<domain>\]<username> [/p
]]] [{/m <module> | /svc | /v}] [/fo {table | list | csv}] [/nh] [/fi <filter> [/fi <filter> [ ... ]]]</filter></filter></module></username> </domain></computer></m:rmargin>
Parameter description:<o></o>
/s <computer></computer> :- To provide IP specification or name of the remote computer; if not provided local computer is considered. Do not use backslashes in the value of the parameter.
/u <domain>\<username></username></domain> :- To provide UserName or Domain\UserName under whose permission command should execute. If not provided then command run under the permission of person who is logged on. Option /u can be used only if /s is specified.

/p </m:lmargin>:- For the password of that user account which is provided with /u parameter. Password is prompted in case this field is omitted.
/m <module></module> :- All tasks are listed that are currently using the given pattern name. In case no match found all modules are displayed.
/svc :- All service information is listed hosted in each process without truncation. It is only valid when /fo (format) parameter is used.
/v :- Task information is displayed in verbose mode. Parameters /v and /svc are used together in order to display the complete verbose output without truncation.
/fo {table | list | csv} :- Displays formatted output with default format table. Other valid values are list, csv. csv is the comma separated value format.
/nh :- Valid only for table and csv formats. Used to specify that the “Column Header” not to be displayed in the output.
/fi <filter> </filter> :- To display a set of tasks matching a given criteria as specified in filter.

Filters description:
Filters are provided to filter the result. This filtering is based on some Filter names which are checked with some relational operators. You will observe that the filter names are the column names which comes in task manager......

Taskkill: As the name of the utility “taskkill” suggests that it is simply used to see the running processes and to kill one or more processes either by using its PID i.e. ProcessID or by using its Image name i.e. by which it is present in system and being executed. We can also filter the results on the basis of user name, PID, image name, CPU time, memory usage etc at the time of killing or terminating a process.

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[HappyAndyK]

Thanks for the useful post.

Just wish to clarify, taskkill is a relative of tasklist, that can be used to kill a process from the command line.

Btw, do all versions of Vista have tasklist.exe ? I am not sure.

Else there is always Process Explorer from SysInternals to help out.