Perhaps you’re working happily on a remote Windows server, then find a process that runs awry using up valuable CPU cycles. What do you do? Kill it!
In this tutorial, you will learn how to kill a Windows process using native utilities, third-party utilities, and PowerShell. You will first learn how to examine the running processes in Windows and then kill running processes.
Prerequisites
If you’d like to follow along with the steps in this tutorial, be sure you have the following ahead of time:
- A Windows PC – All demos in this tutorial will use Windows 10, but Windows 7+ will work also.
- A Windows Server or another Windows desktop to use as your target for killing the remote tasks. This tutorial uses a standalone Windows Server 2016 as the remote server.
- The Sysinternals Suite from Microsoft.
- Windows PowerShell 5 or greater. This tutorial uses PowerShell v7.1.3
Querying Remote Windows Process with Tasklist
Since Windows XP, there has been a helpful tool called tasklist. Tasklist is a handy tool that queries processes on remote computers. Before you can kill a process, you must first discover them!
Open a PowerShell session or command prompt on your desktop and type in the following command to display all the running processes on your remote computer.
The command below queries a remote computer (/S) authenticating the connection with the administrator username (/U) and password (/P).
tasklist /S WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net /U administrator /P passwordYou’ll notice below that the Session Name does not appear. Since you’re running tasklist on a remote computer, tasklist does not provide the Session Name.
Perhaps you prefer only to list a single process. Not a problem. To do that, specify the /FI parameter. The /FI parameter accepts a query that is passed to the tasklist to filter out specific processes.
tasklist /S WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" /U administrator /P 'password'
Querying Remote Windows Process with PSList
Another tool to view running processes is PSList, and this utility is part of the Sysinternals Suite. This suite of tools has been around for many years and was created by Mark Russinovich, CTO of Azure!
Let’s get started on how you can view running processes on a remote computer.
1. Open a PowerShell session or command prompt on your desktop and change the directory to where you extracted the Sysinternal Suite.
2. In your PowerShell session, run the following command to display the running processes on the remote computer and associated CPU usage in real-time.
The command below runs pslist to query all remote Windows processes on the WIN-BANGJIEFNOC computer authenticating the Administrator username (-u) and password (-p).
The command uses the -s switch turns pslist into “task manager mode” that repeatedly updates the list.
If it’s the first time you have used a Sysinternals tool, a banner may appear that asks you to accept the EULA; click on OK.
.\pslist \\WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -u Administrator -p 'password' -sYou now see the following output from running that command; for this article, you are concerned with 3 of these values. As shown below.
- Name: The name of the process.
- Pid: Process Identifier, a critical value used in this tutorial, the PID number can be used to kill a remote process. It’s the numerical id assigned to a process.
- CPU: This shows in near real-time the utilization of your overall available CPU.
The other values are memory-related and beyond the scope of this article.
3. Since step two used the -s switch, hit Ctrl-C to quit pslist to get back to the console.
Narrow down the list of processes returned by using the
-eswitch followed by the process name, e.g.,-e Winlogon.
Killing Processes By Process Name with PSKill
Once you know how to find remote processes, let’s now dive into how to kill them. To start, let’s cover the pskill utility. First, learn how to kill processes by process name.
1. Ensure you have a process you can kill on your remote server. This tutorial will use the notepad process.
2. Open a PowerShell session or command prompt on your local desktop and change the directory to where you extracted the Sysinternal Suite and run the following command. You can see the syntax for pskill is similar to pslist.
.\pskill.Exe \\WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -u administrator -p 'password' -e notepad.exe
3. Now, run pslist, as explained in the previous section, to confirm the process is indeed stopped.
.\pslist \\WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -u Administrator -p 'password' -e notepad.exe
Killing Processes By Process ID with PSKill
Killing the process by name might be good enough for your needs if only a single instance of that process is running or you want to kill all processes with that name. What if you’re going to kill a particular instance of a running process? The following steps will demonstrate this.
1. On your remote server, open Notepad twice; you will kill one of these processes in this demonstration; you can of course, substitute other processes.
2. Run the following command taking note of one of the Pid‘s as shown below; you need that for the next step.
.\pslist \\WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -u Administrator -p password -e notepad
3. Using the PID, now run pskill, providing the PID as the last argument.
.\pskill.Exe \\WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -u administrator -p password 1984
4. Finally, check that you still have one instance of Notepad running by rerunning pslist. You should now only see a single instance of Notepad running.
Killing Remote Windows Processes with TaskKill by Name
The taskkill utility is native to Windows and includes further command-line options for restarting processes by username and application name. Let’s get started and kill Notepad again!
Kill Process by Name
1. On your remote server, open Notepad; Notepad is the process you will kill in this demonstration; you can, of course, substitute another process.
2. Open a PowerShell session or command prompt on your desktop. Typing the following command will kill notepad.exe
taskkill /S WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net /you administrator /p password /IM notepad.exeThe output is shown below:
/IM is the parameter for Image; in this case, it is notepad.exe
3. To confirm the process is stopped, run tasklist. You should now see no tasks are matching that filter.
tasklist /S WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" /U administrator /P 'password'
Killing Remote Windows Processes with TaskKill by PID
Killing a process with taskkill using a PID isn’t much different than using the process name. But, since you can’t use the name, you’ll first need to find the PID and then pass that to taskkill.
Assuming you Notepad running on your remote Windows host:
1. Run tasklist as shown below to find the PID of the Notepad process. Take note of one of the PID’s as shown below; you need that for the next step.
tasklist /S WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" /U administrator /P 'password'
2. Now, run taskkill providing the PID as the last argument.
taskkill /S WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net /u administrator /p 'password' /PID 3776
3. Finally, run tasklist to confirm the process is stopped.
Killing a Remote Windows Process with PowerShell
PowerShell gives you a couple of options for killing remote processes; the first cmdlet Stop-Process cannot natively kill a remote process, as it does not have an option to specify a computer name. But, you can get around this issue by running Stop-Process remotely via PowerShell Remoting.
1. If your host and remote server are not in an Active Directory domain, first provide a username and password, creating a PSCredential object.
$credentials = Get-Credential
2. Next, since the tutorial will use SSL to connect to the remote computer and use a self-signed certificate, create a PSSessionOption that will skip the certificate check for a trusted certificate authority.
$PSSessionOption = New-PSSessionOption -SkipCACheck3. Now, connect to the server with the Enter-PSSession command, which establishes an interactive session to the remote server.
The command below is connecting to the WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net computer using the username and password provided above (Credential), skipping the certification authority check (SessionOption), and connecting via SSL (UseSSL).
Enter-PSSession -ComputerName WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -Credential $credentials -SessionOption $PSSessionOption -UseSSL
4. Once you’re connected to the remote host, check the process you want to kill by running Get-Process. In this case, you’ll see the notepad process.
Get-Process -ProcessName Notepad
5. To kill this process, run Stop-Process, as shown below.
Stop-Process -ProcessName Notepad6. Finally, confirm you’ve killed the process by rerunning Get-Process, and you should receive an error message.
If you’d like to stop a remote Windows process non-interactively, use the
Invoke-Commandcommand using the following parameters:Invoke-Command -ComputerName WIN-BANGJIEFNOC.local.net -Credential $credentials -ScriptBlock {Stop-Process -ProcessName notepad} -UseSSL. Encapsulating theStop-Procescommand in theScriptBlockparameter sends the command to the remote host.
Conclusion
You have learned about different methods of killing remote processes and how to overcome situations where network firewall rules might stop utilities from working correctly; this tutorial might have also helped you fix Windows.
The utilities you learned about are potent tools; use with care!
