Command line way of stopping a process in windows

Question

Is there a command line way of stopping a process if I know the name of the exe (or better give a wildcard). I was about to jump in and write an autohotkey script to do it but I thought I would look for out of the box ways first.

Interested in Windows XP and Vista.

Answer 1

Solution

You can use the taskkill command.

Note: The command is not available in Windows XP Home/Starter Edition.

Examples

taskkill /IM app.exe
taskkill /IM app*.exe

Further reading

• Taskkill

Answer 2

With PowerShell, you can use Stop-Process supplying either an id or name

Answer 3

You can use wmic (Which uses WMI):

wmic process where "NAME like '%PROCESS_NAME%'" call terminate