How can I determine a cmd.exe's parent process
You can use WMI to get this information. The Win32_Process class contains ParentProcessId
So (using PowerShell to execute WMI commands—other WMI tools are available):
gwmi Win32_Process -filter 'processid = 1234' | select ParentProcessId
will give the parent process id of process 1234.
This isn't from within cmd.exe itself but Process Explorer has a tree view which shows parent processes.
