Managing Process with Process id (PID)

Sometime windows taskmanager do not help us to find and manage some process that is running and hampering system performance, well we never know the process may be a unwanted program, malware, spyware or so on. So tracking those programs become essential. Program can be tracked by their process id, follow the instruction below.

Process identifier is a unique number assigned to each processes running on a system. more commonly referred as PID or process ID. This is generally length around 4 to 5. PID is used by operating system’s process manager to maintain, wait or terminate as required.

Something it become necessity for system administrator to manage process on its own, i.e. something system admin many need to kill a long running process.

 In Unix-like and Linux operating system, ps command can be used to search for the PID for a particular running process, by grepping the output. In Windows operating system such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, we can use tasklist DOS utility to view PID. We can also display PID column in windows taskmanager.

Tasklist utility:

This utility is used by system administrator to view and manage processes in system or system in network. This gives detail list of all processes (hidden, system process, services etc.)

Taskmanage (GUI):

In order to get to know, or view, retrieve and identify the process ID or PID of the processes running in Windows operating system, users or administrators can make use of Task Manager. However, Task Manager does not display PID information by default. To display the PID value in Task Manager, go to Processes tab, click on View menu, then click on Select Columns…. In the “Select Columns” or “Select Process Page Columns” dialog, tick and check the checkbox for PID (Process Identifier), and click OK.

 Terminate program with PID: 

 Well once you get process id (PID), you can kill it as you might require  by taskkill utility of MS-DOS.

we have a complementary TASKKILL.EXE command. This utility uses almost the same syntax as TASKLIST.EXE

Programs can be terminated with their process id (PID)

Above the /F option is to forcefully terminate the process and /IM is the image name to terminate. Taskkill utility can also be used to terminate program with their name too as follows.