Comments on: CyberNotes: Shortcut to Close Multiple Programs

By: Ace

Ace — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:09:20 +0000

Thank you for the solution.
This will be of great help to developers who wish to kill several backend programs at a time!

By: jrau18

jrau18 — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 01:32:12 +0000

This article was VERY helpful. I made a few changes, but it would have been impossible without this article as a starting point.

But, if I may add something. If you are running multiple instances of the same program, this kind of shits on you (as in two separate example.exe). I don’t know if it’s changes in 7 or what, but I had to tweak it a bit. I used:

taskkill /f /t /im TASKNAME

If I removed /f or /t it didn’t work right. Sometimes it would only close one instance, sometime none of them. I put /f /t in front of every line and it works like a dream.

By: CraigC

CraigC — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 05:54:50 +0000

Sorry for the duplicate posts. There was an error and I didn’t think it was posting.

Testing on Windows 7 revealed that the command will need to be ran as Administrator in Vista and 7. Consequently, if ran from a batch file, the log file will be created in c:\windows\system32 instead of the directory the batch file is executed from unless you edit the command to write to a absolute path.

[vistax64.com]

By: CraigC

CraigC — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 04:47:28 +0000

curious…I wondered the same thing. I checked taskkill /? and experimented a bit on an XP SP 3 machine, and came up with the following command.

“TASKKILL /FI “USERNAME ne SYSTEM” /FI “USERNAME ne LOCAL SERVICE” /FI “USERNAME ne NETWORK SERVICE” /FI “IMAGENAME ne msseces.exe” /FI “IMAGENAME ne explorer.exe” /FI “IMAGENAME ne taskmgr.exe” /IM * /T /F >> killall.log 2>&1″

It will forcefully kill all processes and their children, except those list below, and append the output and any errors to killall.log in the working directory.

Excludes

1. all processes running under the SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE, and NETWORK SERVICE accounts
2. explorer.exe (this means it doesn’t kill any open “Windows Explorer” windows either)
3. taskmgr.exe
4. msseces.exe (Microsoft Security Essentials)

By: curious

curious — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:20:53 +0000

is there a way to close all processes except a few essential ones for windows?something that ll take out the random process that i have overlooked to put in into the batch file?as in leave the system on with only clean legitimate processes i trust?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 31 May 2009 20:29:05 +0000

melovespot wrote:

Thanks for that great “appkiller”. I got a question there, is it possible to shutdown, after closing this apps, with the same file?

Yes, it is possible. You can use this command on one of the lines:SHUTDOWN -s -t 01

By: melovespot

melovespot — Sat, 30 May 2009 23:04:05 +0000

Thanks for that great “appkiller”.
I got a question there, is it possible to shutdown, after closing this apps, with the same file?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:23:11 +0000

Thanks a lot This works great saves me a lot of hassle
Now I would love one that would switch from aero to classic if its possible someone mentioned something above anyone know how ?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:53:42 +0000

This did not work for me. I am running windows xp home edition service pack 3.

By: john

john — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:52:12 +0000

Dantravels:

kill firefox.exe

worked in windows 2000 for me. Hope that helps.