PowerShell – Managing Processes

PowerShell provides cmdlets, to manage the Processes currently running on the local Computer or on the remote Computer. In this Article, we are going to discuss the commands to Display & Manage the Processes using PowerShell.

Get-Process cmdlet to Display Currently Running Processes

Get-Process is the cmdlet, we use to display the currently running Processes in the local Computer. This command displays below details of the running Processes:

PS C:\> Get-Process

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
    320      52   169192     203824   573    77.58   6404 chrome
     22       5     2172       3460    44     0.06   9836 cmd
    762      71    38412      56996   299    14.60   4048 explorer
      0       0        0         24     0               0 Idle
     61       7     1916       6824    75     0.09   9292 notepad
    547      24    64032      69056   607    21.68   5052 powershell
    158      17     4428      12356   110     0.34   4276 rundll32
    369      16     8916      12684    49    39.42    968 services
    627      29    19516      22216    97   100.36    156 svchost
   1059       0      280       7360    10   281.77      4 System
     83      10     1668       4916    44     0.66    908 wininit
    121      10     4312       8928    59     0.95    712 winlogon

Observe that, Get-Process displays more details of the Process. Mostly we use “Id” & “ProcessName”:

Id: Process Id of the Process. Operating System allocated an unique Id for each Process.

ProcessName: Name of the Process.

Display specific processes only

Instead of displaying all the processes currently running, we can also display specific processes too. For example, below command displays only the processes, whose name is “notepad”;

PS C:\> Get-Process notepad

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
     61       7     1924       6824    81     0.09   9292 notepad

Observe that, in above command; we have passed the name of process as an argument to Get-Process command. You can also pass this as the value of the -Name property; which refers the name of the process. The above command can be written as;

PS C:\> Get-Process -Name notepad

We can also use multiple process names to display; and each process name should be separated by a comma (“,”). Below command displays “chrome” and “iexplore” processes;

PS C:\> Get-Process -Name chrome, iexplore

We can also use wildcards to display multiple processes. Let’s see,  how many processes currently running; whose name contains “exp”. We can use WildCards (*) in our command.

PS C:\> Get-Process *exp*

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
    736      73    28640      52348   277    14.71   4316 explorer
    705     104    30304      51604 -1778    15.63   5752 iexplore
    792     148   148164     187640   477   379.97   5904 iexplore
   1016     572   660688     653924  1060 1,006.63   9004 iexplore
    673     330   323500     342872   650    37.22  10024 iexplore

Observe that, currently 2 Applications (5 Processes) are running; whose name contains “exp” . Notice that, these processes have unique Ids.

Sort the list of running Processes

Below command is used to sort the Processes depending on the usage of the memory.

PS C:\> Get-Process | Sort-Object WS -Descending

Notice that, we have used Sort-Object cmdlet, in above command. This is useful to sort the data (Objects). This is the beauty of the PowerShell; PowerShell treats the data as Objects. And Get-Process command generates the output and pass through the pipe-line to Sort-Object to sort the objects. Sorting the objects is  Sort-Object cmdlet‘s functionality; not the functionality of Get-Process cmdlet.

Now, we look at the commands to manage the processes. Managing means; Start or Stop the processes. PowerShell provides below cmdlets to manage the Processes:

• Start-Process and
• Stop-Process

Start-Process cmdlet to Start the Process

Start-Process is the cmdlet, PowerShell provides to start the process. I would like to open a “notepad” application using Start-Process Below, command will open the “notepad” application:

PS C:\> Start-Process notepad

After this command, you will see the NotePad window open.

Let’s see,  how many notepad applications currently running.

PS C:\> Get-Process notepad

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
     61       7     1916       6836    75     0.09   9292 notepad
     57       7     1920       6120    81     0.06   9784 notepad

Observe that, currently 2 notepad processes are running. One was opened with Start-Process command. Notice that, these 2 processes have unique Ids.

Stop-Process cmdlet to Stop the Running Process

Now we will Stop, one of the Process. PowerShell provides a command for this; Stop-Process cmdlet, is used to Stop the currently running Processes.

We have to be more cautious, when we Stopping the Process; otherwise, there may be chances to loose the Unsaved data. For example, we have 2 Notepad Applications, currently running as per the above results from Get-Process. I want to close only the Notepad with the Process ID 9784. So, our command should like below;

PS C:\> Stop-Process -Id 9784

This way we can restrict our commands to specific Processes. If you want to close all the Notepad Applications; below command will be helpful: But, you need to run this with more caution; otherwise, you may loose any unsaved data.

PS C:\> Stop-Process -Name notepad

We will discuss more about PowerShell cmdlets, in upcoming Articles.

[..] David