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windowsbatch-filetasklist

How do I simply kill a process from my batch file?

My code needs to check if notepad.exe is listed under tasklist. If it is, the batch file will close it.

 @echo off
 tasklist /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" > nul
 if errorlevel 1 taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe"
 exit
Solution

  • tasklist always returns an errorlevel of 0, even when it doesn't find anything. In order to work around this, you should instead pipe the output of tasklist to find, which will return an errorlevel of 0 if the process is found and 1 if the process is not found.

    @echo off
tasklist | find /I "notepad.exe" >nul
if "%errorlevel%"=="0" taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe"