How to find a process pid with wmic and kill it with taskkill

Question

I need to find a process PID with WMIC command, and then kill this process with taskkill. I've almost achieved that, but the only problem is there is a newline on the end of the PID variable. So far i made this:

c:\patryk>for /F "skip=1 tokens=*" %a in ('wmic process where "CommandLine like '%sourceprocessor%' and name like '%java%'" get ProcessId') do taskkill /pid | set /p pid=%a

So this is looping through the output of wmic which contains 3 lines: title (ProcessId), found PID (a number) and an empty line. I'm skipping first line, because it's just title. Now i want to kill a process with pid found in second line. And there is a problem, that it has an newline mark at the end of the line, so whole command does not work. Can anybody give me some advice how can i achieve that? How can i remove this newline mark?

Solution 1

for /F "skip=2 tokens=2 delims=," %a in (
  'wmic process where " .... " get ProcessID^,Status /format:csv'
) do taskkill /pid %a

Now you have an output from wmic with an aditional line at the start (from here the skip), with fields separated with commas (the delim), and three fields included: the node (computername) that is automatically added, the processid (the second token) and a final status field that will not be used but allows us to retrieve the second token in the line without the ending CR

Or you can add an aditional for command to your initial line

for /f ... %a in ( ... ) do for %b in (%a) do taskkil /pid %b

This aditional for loop will remove the CR character from the retrieved wmic data that is in %a.

Solution 2

I had a similar problem where I had to stop a task only knowing the name of the running file. The solution was:

for /f "tokens=2 delims=," %%a in (
    'wmic service get name^,pathname^,state /format:csv ^| findstr /i /r /c:"SomeServer\.exe.*Running$"'
) do sc stop "%%a"

This will stop the process by name. Maybe you can use the file name instead of the PID?!?

Comments

[MichaelS]

Sorry, just noticed that it's about processes and not about services. It still might help so I won't delete it.

[Admin]

Thank you for your answer. This solution works, but i've found something easier. When we were looking for such an hard way to kill the process it turned out that it's quite simple: wmic process where "CommandLine like '%sourceprocessor%' and name like '%java%'" call terminate does the job :)

[MC ND]

@PatrykS, Just one note. taskkill (without /f) sends a wm_close message to the target process asking it to close. wmi Terminate method is not so gentle and directly kills the process. If there is no risk of data lost it does not matter, else, a better approach is to start with taskkill and if after some time the process is still running, then use taskkill /f or wmi terminate to ensure the process ends.

[Admin]

thank you for advice, i'm aware that. Fortunately there is no risk of data loss and the process can be terminated.