How to find and stop processes using Powershell

Posted 18 Mar. 2021 | 2 min read.

There are times where you might want to automate finding and stopping all instances of an application. Or, you want to find out which instance of an application is taking up too much resources and stop only that one.

Fortunately, there are two useful commands in Powershell that let us do just that: Get-Process and Stop-Process.

Stop-Process

To stop a process, simply specify the process name:

Stop-Process -Name <process-name>

For example:

# Stop all instances of Google Chrome
Stop-Process -Name Chrome

This will however stop all instances of the application.

But what if only want to stop a single instance of an application?

Chrome for instance, has at least as many instances as you have tabs open.

To stop a single instance, you can specify the ID:

Stop-Process -Id <process-id>

But wait, where do you get the ID? This is where Get-Process can be used.

Get-Process

To get all running processes on the system, simply type Get-Process:

Get-Process

Alternatively, to get all of the processes with the same name, you can filter down the list using -ProcessName:

Get-Process -ProcessName <process-name>

Using both together

Using our example of Chrome, we would get:

PS C:\Users\Sean> Get-Process -ProcessName Chrome

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      -----     ------     --  -- -----------
    358      20    44408      67352       2.34   1896   1 chrome
    235      16    24952      37756       8.13   1908   1 chrome
    258      19    42480      58624       6.48   2064   1 chrome
    288      20    47472      81420       2.09   2096   1 chrome
   8469     140   272552     252188   4,913.67   2328   1 chrome
    300      21    72160     112296      14.13   3132   1 chrome
    356      29   115924      63600      48.20   3756   1 chrome
    665      10     2728       7808       1.02   4364   1 chrome

The instance with ID 2328 seems to be taking up most of the resources. Let's stop it:

Stop-Process -Id 2328
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