Really killing a process in Windows

user_1694 0
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Occasionally a program on a Windows machine goes crazy and just hangs. So I'll call up the task manager and hit the "End Process" button for it. However, this doesn't always work; if I try it enough times then it'll usually die eventually, but I'd really like to be able to just kill it immediately. On Linux I could just kill -9 to guarantee that a process will die.

This also could be used for writing batch scripts and writing batch scripts is programming.

Is there some program or command that comes with Windows that will always kill a process? A free third-party app would be fine, although I'd prefer to be able to do this on machines I sit down at for the first time.

windows
11 Answers

"End Process" on the Processes-Tab calls TerminateProcess which is the most ultimate way Windows knows to kill a process.

If it doesn't go away, it's currently locked waiting on some kernel resource (probably a buggy driver) and there is nothing (short of a reboot) you could do to make the process go away.

Have a look at this blog-entry from wayback when: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/17/unkillable-processes.aspx

Unix based systems like Linux also have that problem where processes could survive a kill -9 if they are in what's known as "Uninterruptible sleep" (shown by top and ps as state D) at which point the processes sleep so well that they can't process incoming signals (which is what kill does - sending signals).

Normally, Uninterruptible sleep should not last long, but as under Windows, broken drivers or broken userpace programs (vfork without exec) can end up sleeping in D forever.

pilif_50830 
taskkill /im myprocess.exe /f

The "/f" is for "force". If you know the PID, then you can specify that, as in:

taskkill /pid 1234 /f

Lots of other options are possible, just type taskkill /? for all of them. The "/t" option kills a process and any child processes; that may be useful to you.

JosephStyons_6720
IainMH_11220

One trick that works well is to attach a debugger and then quit the debugger.

On XP or Windows 2003 you can do this using ntsd that ships out of the box:

ntsd -pn myapp.exe

ntsd will open up a new window. Just type 'q' in the window to quit the debugger and take out the process.

I've known this to work even when task manager doesn't seem able to kill a process.

Unfortunately ntsd was removed from Vista and you have to install the (free) debbugging tools for windows to get a suitable debugger.

Rob_Walker_36310

I had this issue too, here is how I solved it.

1/ Open the « task manager « 

2/ Locate the application name in the list

3/ Once found, right click on its name then click on « properties »

4/ In the properties interface, click on « security « 

5/ Click on « edit » to change permissions

6/ « Deny » all permissions for all users, click on «  apply » then « ok »

7/ click on « advanced » for special permissions settings

8/ Remove permissions for all users

9/ click on «  apply » then « ok »

10/ click on «  apply » then « ok » again

11/ you can now kill the process on task manager as well as uninstall the app of you want to.

user_56913560

FYI you can sometimes use SYSTEM or Trustedinstaller to kill tasks ;)

google quickkill_3_0.bat

sc config TrustedInstaller binPath= "cmd /c TASKKILL /F  /IM notepad.exe
sc start "TrustedInstaller"
user_47761400

wmic process where processid="11008" call terminate

user_3229840
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