Any way to write a Windows .bat file to kill processes?
PerformanceBatch FileProcessPerformance Problem Overview
Every time I turn on my company-owned development machine, I have to kill 10+ processes using the Task Manager or any other process management app just to get decent performance out of my IDE. Yes, these are processes from programs that my company installs on my machine for security and compliance. What I'd like to do is have a .bat file or script of some kind with which I can kill the processes in question.
Does anybody know how to do this?
Performance Solutions
Solution 1 - Performance
You can do this with 'taskkill'. With the /IM parameter, you can specify image names.
Example:
taskkill /im somecorporateprocess.exe
You can also do this to 'force' kill:
Example:
taskkill /f /im somecorporateprocess.exe
Just add one line per process you want to kill, save it as a .bat file, and add in your startup directory. Problem solved!
If this is a legacy system, PsKill will do the same.
Solution 2 - Performance
taskkill /f /im "devenv.exe"
this will forcibly kill the pid with the exe name "devenv.exe"
equivalent to -9 on the nix'y kill command
Solution 3 - Performance
As TASKKILL might be unavailable on some Home/basic editions of windows here some alternatives:
TSKILL processName
or
TSKILL PID
Have on mind that processName should not have the .exe suffix and is limited to 18 characters.
Another option is WMIC :
wmic Path win32_process Where "Caption Like 'MyProcess%.exe'" Call Terminate
wmic offer even more flexibility than taskkill with its SQL-like matchers .With wmic Path win32_process get you can see the available fileds you can filter (and % can be used as a wildcard).
Solution 4 - Performance
I'm assuming as a developer, you have some degree of administrative control over your machine. If so, from the command line, run msconfig.exe. You can remove many processes from even starting, thereby eliminating the need to kill them with the above mentioned solutions.
Solution 5 - Performance
Get Autoruns from Mark Russinovich, the Sysinternals guy that discovered the Sony Rootkit... Best software I've ever used for cleaning up things that get started automatically.
Solution 6 - Performance
Download PSKill. Write a batch file that calls it for each process you want dead, passing in the name of the process for each.
Solution 7 - Performance
Use Powershell! Built in cmdlets for managing processes. Examples here (hard way), here(built in) and here (more).
Solution 8 - Performance
Please find the below logic where it works on the condition.
If we simply call taskkill /im applicationname.exe, it will kill only if this process is running. If this process is not running, it will throw an error.
So as to check before takskill is called, a check can be done to make sure execute taskkill will be executed only if the process is running, so that it won't throw error.
tasklist /fi "imagename eq applicationname.exe" |find ":" > nul
if errorlevel 1 taskkill /f /im "applicationname.exe"
Solution 9 - Performance
Here I wrote an example command that you can paste in your cmd command line prompt and is written for chrome.exe.
FOR /F "tokens=2 delims= " %P IN ('tasklist /FO Table /M "chrome*" /NH') DO (TASKKILL /PID %P)
The for just takes all the PIDs listed on the below tasklist command and executes TASKKILL /PID on every PID
tasklist /FO Table /M "chrome*" /NH
If you use the for in a batch file just use %%P instead of %P