TIL about Tasklist and Taskkill

24 Jun 2011
Posted by cgp

Tasklist and Taskkill are built into Windows XP and Windows 7. I've used PS Tools for a number of years and this is the first I had heard of the built in tool. They do what you might expect a tool named as such do which is manage tasks via the command line.

For my purposes, one thing that the built in TaskKill did better than pskill -- kill children processes. For some reason, pskill wasn't killing children processes (even with -t specified) spawned by launch 4j so this is illuminating. Kudos to MS for putting this built in. Now if we can just get robocopy and powershell, we'll be all set.