Stopping Processes (kill)

Command Equivalents

Description

The Stop-Process cmdlet is used to terminate one or more running processes. It is the PowerShell equivalent of the kill command in Linux and is often used with its kill alias for familiarity.

You can stop a process in several ways, most commonly by specifying its name, its process ID (PID), or by passing a process object directly to it through the pipeline.

Ways to Target a Process

By Name (-Name)

You can stop a process by providing its name. Be aware that this will stop all running processes that share that name.

By ID (-Id)

To target a single, specific instance of a process, you can use its unique process ID. This is useful when multiple processes have the same name (like web browser tabs).

By Piping (Get-Process | Stop-Process)

This is a powerful and common pattern in PowerShell. You can use Get-Process with complex filters to find specific processes, and then pipe those process objects directly to Stop-Process to terminate them.

Common Usage

Stopping a Process by Name

This is the most direct way to stop an application.

# Stops all running instances of Notepad
Stop-Process -Name "notepad"

# Using the kill alias is shorter
kill -Name "notepad"

Stopping a Process by ID

First, find the ID using ps, then use that ID to stop the specific process.

# Let's say 'ps' shows that a specific instance of chrome has ID 9876
Stop-Process -Id 9876

# Using the alias
kill -Id 9876

Stopping a Process via the Pipeline

This method is useful for more advanced scenarios. For example, to stop all instances of Microsoft Edge that are not responding.

# First, find all Edge processes, then filter for those whose 'Responding' property is false, then stop them.
Get-Process -Name "msedge" | Where-Object { -not $_.Responding } | Stop-Process

Forcing a Stop

If a process is not terminating cleanly, you can use the -Force parameter to attempt a more forceful shutdown.

kill -Name "frozen_app" -Force

Requesting Confirmation

For safety, especially in scripts, you can use the -Confirm switch. This will cause PowerShell to prompt you for confirmation before it stops each process.

# PowerShell will ask "Are you sure?" for each Chrome process it finds.
kill -Name "chrome" -Confirm