Any way to write a Windows .bat file to kill processes? [closed]

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?

Solution 1:

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:

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:

As TASKKILL might be unavailable on some Home/basic editions of windows here some alternatives:

TSKILL processName

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:

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:

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.