XP: kill a Windows process from the command line with taskkill

The ability to perform tasks from a system's command line allows those tasks to be used in batch files.This post describes several uses of taskkill to terminate Windows processes.

If you know the name of a process to kill, for example notepad.exe, use the following command from a command prompt to end it: 

taskkill /IM notepad.exe

This will cause the program to terminate by asking for confirmation if there are unsaved changes.
To forcefully kill the same process, add the /F option to the command line. Be careful with the /F option as it will terminate all matching processes without confirmation.


To kill a single instance of a process, specify its process id (PID). For example, if the desired process has a PID of 827, use the following command to kill it:

taskkill /PID 827

Using filters, a variety of different patterns can be used to specify the processes to kill. For example, the following filter syntax will forcefully kill all processes owned by the user Quinn:

taskkill /F /FI "USERNAME eq Quinn"

The following table shows the available filters and their use.

Filter Name   Valid Operators     Valid Value(s)
-----------      ---------------      --------------

STATUS                eq ne                     RUNNING | NOT RESPONDING
 
IMAGENAME      eq ne                     Image name

PID                         eq ne gt lt ge le    PID value

SESSION               eq ne gt lt ge le    Session number.

CPUTIME             eq ne gt lt ge le     CPU time in the formatof hh:mm:ss.

MEMUSAGE         eq ne gt lt ge le     Memory usage in KB

USERNAME          eq ne                      User name in [domain\]userformat

MODULES             eq ne                       DLL name

SERVICES              eq ne                      Service name

WINDOWTITLE   eq ne                      Window title


--
   eq: equals                 ne: not equal

   gt: greater than           lt: less than

   gt: greater than or equal  le: less than or equal

--