Tag Archives: Windows Ninja

How to kill a Windows process/task from command-line?

What do you do if the application used to kill other applications itself becomes the problem? I’m talking about the Windows “Task Manager”; it always comes in handy when an application is acting up. But today, the Task Manager itself became the problem and I needed something to shut-it-down (or resort to restarting my laptop)!

So I thought there must be a way to achieve the same from the command-line (and thus, be able to kill Task Manager), and certainly there was – the command taskkill – as I found here. You need to know the rogue program’s name, for example, if Notepad was acting up, you would open the command (DOS) prompt (Start –> Run –> cmd) and enter the following:

taskkill /IM notepad.exe

In Task Manager’s case, I entered:

taskkill /IM taskmgr.exe

Congrats! You are now a more lethal Windows ninja! *haeeyyaaa*