How to end a process with PowerShell

Windows offers you many different ways to terminate a process. It can be done with Task Manager, with the console tool taskkill and with a huge number of third party apps. Let's see one more method. Today, we will see how to end a process using PowerShell.

PowerShell comes with a useful cmdlet "Stop-Process". It allows you to terminate a single process or multiple processes. There are several ways to use it.
Let's see how.

How to end a process with PowerShell

Table of contents

1. Terminate a process by its ID
2. Terminate a process by its name

Terminate a process by its ID

If you know the process ID you want to kill, you can use it in the Stop-Process cmdlet. If you do not know it, you can use the Get-Process cmdlet to find it. Run it without parameters to get the list of processes with their IDs. See the following screenshot:

In this example, I am going to kill regedit.exe. Its ID is 3420. It should be done as follows:

Stop-Process 3420

Note: to terminate an elevated process, you need to open PowerShell as Administrator. Please refer to the following article:

All ways to open PowerShell in Windows 10

Otherwise you'll get the following error message: "Access is denied".

It works from the elevated instance:

Terminate a process by its name

Another way to use Stop-Process is killing process by its name. The syntax is as follows:

Stop-Process -processname regedit

You can even end multiple apps at once by typing their process names delimited by a comma:

Stop-Process -processname regedit, regownershipex

The above command will terminate Registry Editor and the RegOwnershipEx app.

Tip: for the Stop-Process cmdlet, you can use the following short aliases:

spps
kill

For the Get-Process cmdlet, use the following aliases:

gps
ps