Kill multiple processes in Windows

Use command line to stop or kill a process automatically.

Or use command line to stop multiple processes using batch file script.

If you’re running an application and you just want to stop the process at a certain time killing the process via command line will be a good option.

If you are developing a program and still on the debugging process, scheduling the process to stop the program due to its memory leak issue or other good reasons could be a good idea to stop the process automatically after a certain period of time.

Taskkill.exe is a command line tool to stop or kill a process via command line.

Tasklist.exe can be used in conjunction with taskkill.exe to list the running processes.

To kill a process Taskkill can use a PID or the process name as an input parameter.

We take notepad.exe as an example.

To kill a process (notepad.exe), type this command below.

         Taskkill /IM  "notepad.exe"

It will stop or kill all notepad.exe processes; if there are 3 or 5 notepad that are open all will be closed.

See output sample below by executing above command line:

      C:\Windows\System32>Taskkill /IM "notepad.exe"

     SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "notepad.exe" with PID 4856.

     SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "notepad.exe" with PID 3208.

     SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "notepad.exe" with PID 7036.

If you just want to stop a single process, use the PID or the Process ID.

Like Taskkill /PID  ;   Run Tasklist to find the PID process.

To kill different processes, you can make use of a batch file script.

Create a notepad, and type the name of the processes that you want to close.

For example, open notepad and type:

          Excel.exe

         Winword.exe

         Calc.exe

         Iexplore.exe

And save it on d drive or any location in your hard drive that you want and save it as a “ProcessList.txt”

You can type this command below on a command prompt for experiment or you can make it as a batch file.

      For /F  %i in (d:\ProcessList.txt) do @Taskkill /IM  %i

Let’s make it a batch file, open “Notepad” and copy and paste the command below to your notepad.

      For /F  %%i in (d:\ProcessList.txt) do @Taskkill /IM  %%i

After copying the command above, save the file as “StopProcesses.bat”

In notepad, if you want to save the file as “.bat” you must enclosed the filename with quotation marks    or else the file will be save as “.txt” file.

See image below on how to save it as a batch file script.

The ProcessList.txt contains these lines:

   Excel.exe

   Winword.exe

   Calc.exe

   Iexplore.exe

It will close instances of excel that is open, any Microsoft word that is open, any instances of windows calculator and also Internet Explorer web browser that is open.

So if you want to follow the example open those applications, and open command prompt browse to the location where you save the batch file and execute the script.

After executing the command you will notice that all application has been close instantly.

Below is the screen shot output of the command:

Notice the screen shot that the excel file was not running so it has an error that shows that the excel file was not found and results to an error.

So you can run an application and use a batch file and task scheduler to close the application at an specified time that you want.

Till next time guys, hope it helps J