How to Kill process from PowerShell

Powershell provides command Stop-Process to kill a process from command prompt. This command can take in process Id, process name etc and can kill process from CMD.

Powershell command to Kill a process using name

Below is an example command to kill a process using name of the application or image file.

Stop-Process -Name ApplicationName

For example, to kill chrome application using powershell

Stop-process -Name Chrome

Note that this command does not ask for confirmation and straight away kill the running process. If the application is running multiple instances on the computer(For example, multiple firefox windows) it kills each of those processes. If you would like to kill a specific instance, you should use processId argument with Stop-Process command.

Powershell command to kill a process using Id

Stop-process -Id processId

Example:
Below are sequence of commands showing Stop-process killing a specific CMD process.

PS C:\> tasklist | findstr /C:cmd
cmd.exe                       7628 Console                    1      4,444 K
cmd.exe                       9640 Console                    1      3,512 K
cmd.exe                       9352 Console                    1      3,564 K
PS C:\> stop-process -Id 7628
PS C:\> tasklist | findstr /C:cmd
cmd.exe                       9640 Console                    1      3,512 K
cmd.exe                       9352 Console                    1      3,564 K

More examples

Kill all CMD processes running on the computer

Stop-Process -name CMD

Kill windows explorer

Stop-Process -name explorer

Kill putty sessions

stop-process -name putty