Member Avatar for koti86

Can you tell me how to kill running applications via cmd.

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Quick practical summary that fills in gaps from the replies: is right that Windows ships a command-line killer, and , and showed name-based usage — but two important clarifications are missing: how to find the right process and what to do when permissions or the shell itself are affected.

Find the process first (name or PID). From cmd you can list processes with:

tasklist

When a name is ambiguous (multiple instances) prefer killing by PID.

Kill by PID from cmd (this stops the specific instance and its children):

taskkill /PID 1234 /T

Or use PowerShell to inspect and stop processes (useful in scripts):

Get-Process -Name MyApp
Stop-Process -Id 1234 -Force

Troubleshooting and cautions: run the console elevated (Administrator) if you see “Access is denied.” Never terminate core system processes like csrss.exe or winlogon.exe — that will crash Windows. If you terminate the shell (explorer.exe as mentioned by and ) you’ll lose the taskbar/desktop; restart it (for example, via Task Manager or by running start explorer from a prompt). For repeated or GUI-driven work, Process Explorer (Sysinternals) is much easier to inspect and kill child trees safely.

Official references: tasklist and taskkill docs and PowerShell Stop-Process are helpful for exact switches and remote options; Process Explorer is a good GUI alternative for tricky cases. This addresses ’s need for practical steps and clarifies when to prefer PID over image-name kills for ’s original question.

Recommended Answers

All 6 Replies

Member Avatar for Stefano Mtangoo

my favorite one
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

Edited by Stefano Mtangoo because: n/a
Member Avatar for FredrikDuwell

I'm just using:
taskkill /IM [application.exe] without [].

Member Avatar for James82

Try the following one:
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

Member Avatar for rosel

this is great, iam also trying to kill apps using cmd.

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Try the following one:
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

Why don't you read the posts in this thread??? That has already been suggested by someone else. You mearly parroted what he said.

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