The Drunk Santa Blog

Command Line Ctrl+Alt+Del

A cheery hello to all geekshoppers. This is your friendly neighborhood geek ^^

*sputter* *hang* aaarggghh.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and most of the times the world is back to normal again. But see the catch is, the Task Manager (The friendly application you pull up by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del) is also, well, an application with a handsome GUI and everything. And loading it up when your system is already dying is a touch difficult at times.

Enter the cmd. For those of you who don’t know what that is, cmd is the command line. It is a kind of an emulation of DOS (the dark predecessor to Windows) from within Windows. Anyway, you can call up cmd by going to Start>Run and typing cmd in the “open” line and pressing enter. Alternatively, you could just press the Windows key+R on your keyboard and the run window will appear.

Going for the kill via the command line/cmd makes things more efficient and faster.

You will need to use 2 commands, tasklist and then tskill OR tasklist and then taskkill. Details of their use follow:

Tasklist: Summon up tasklist by, err , typing “tasklist” on cmd. It will show you a list of all the running processes on your computer. What you need to care about is the memory usage and the PID (process ID) of that program. Any program running on your system is identified by its Process ID and so obviously, we use it to kill a program if we need to.

There are some parameters that can be passed to tasklist to modify its output as per our requirement.

tasklist /v : More information about things like Status, User name, Window Title etc.

Filtering processes: You can filter processes based on multiple parameters. However, if you are in a “about to be/nearly hanged” kind of a situation, you can simply use the following commands to to find processes that are not responding.

tasklist /fi "status eq not responding"

Use the folliwing to list the processes eating up more than “X” MB.

tasklist /fi "memusage gt X000"

Becoming a tasklist pro: Use tasklist /? to gain more insights about the whole tasklist phenomenon.

(NOTE: Tasklist comes bundled with Windows XP Professional, but it does not come with the Home edition. But no worries, those with the Home version of XP can download it here (Rapidshare) or here (non Rapidshare) and can put it in the system path. See how to put things in your system path at the end of this post.)

Tskill : This command is used to end a process, using its name or its PID (Process ID).

Kill with name: Use tskill processname to kill a process with name “processname”.

Kill with PID: Similarly use tskill processid to kill a process with PID processid. (Obvilously, Tasklist can be used to find the PID of a process.)

Professional Killers: To get more info on advanced syntax of the command use tskill /?

(NOTE: You get Tskill with both Windows XP Professional and Home :) .)

Taskkill : Taskkill is essentially tskill, but with more bang for your buck. Apart from specifying the PID or the name of the process to kill, we can use filters to kill the matching processes (as in tasklist).

Kill with name: Use taskill /IM imagename to kill a process with the given Image name. For example:taskkill /im notepad.exe /f (forces notepad to be killed.)

Kill with PID : Use taskill /PID processid to kill a process with the given processid.

Filtering Taskkill: Processes to be killed can be filtered based on multiple parameters. But what what we are essentially interested in doing is use the command to forcefully shut down all the processes that are not responding/eating up too much of our memory.

Killing Not responding programs:

taskkill /f /fi "status eq not responding"

Close down all programs using more than X MB.

taskkill /f /fi "memusage gt X000"

Help?: To get more info on advanced syntax of the command use taskkill /?

(NOTE: Taskkill is only a part of Windows XP Professional. But then again, this is the Geekshop. Download it here (Rapidshare), or here (Non Rapidshare).)

PS: Adding stuff to your system path:

Go to Start and right click on My Computer.

Go to properties and System Properties window will open up. Go to the tab called “advanced” and click on “Environment Variables”.

Go to the System Variables section and select “path” in it. Click “Edit” after selecting path variable.

At the end of the long list of already present statements, add “;” and enter the complete path of the folder where you have kept taskkill/tasklist. (Something like c:\mysecretfolder\taskkill). Save it and taskkill/tasklist should be accessible from your command line.

Alternatively, you could simply paste the exe files in WINDOWS/system32 folder.

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