Trying to find and kill a process by PowerShell script

Question

I have the following script to find the process "dotnet.exe". In my system, I have many dotnet.exe processes running. But I want to kill the "dotnet.exe" which has command line argument "MyService\Web\argument". I'm trying to do it by the following script. But it doesn't find anything, although I see the process in the Task Manager.

$process = Get-WmiObject Win32_Process | select name, commandline

foreach ($p in $process)
{
    if ($p.name -contains "dotnet.exe" -and $p.commandline -contains "web")
    {
        $kp =    Get-Process $p;
        $kp.CloseMainWindow();
        if (!$kp.HasExited)
        {
            $kp | Stop-Process -Force
        }
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host name: $p.name and param: $p.commandline;
    }
}

Answer 1

All you need to do is filter the process list directly via Get-WmiObject and then terminate the matching process(es):

$fltr = "name like '%dotnet.exe%' and commandline like '%web%'"
Get-WmiObject Win32_Process -Filter $fltr | ForEach-Object {
    $_.Terminate()
}

You could also call Terminate() directly on the output of Get-WmiObject like this:

(Get-WmiObject Win32_Process -Filter $fltr).Terminate()

However, there are situations where this could fail, e.g. if Get-WmiObject doesn't return any results, or if you're using PowerShell v2 or earlier and Get-WmiObject returns more than one result (passing a method call to the members of an array requires member enumeration, which was introduced with PowerShell v3). Using a ForEach-Object loop is both more robust and backwards-compatible.