Powershell Stop-Process Many Instances

Question

I have a remote access program that does not clean up after itself after it is closed. In Task Manager, I oftentimes find 5 to 10 instances of the program running. For instance:

XYZ.exe
XYZ.exe
XYZ.exe
XYZ.exe
XYZ.exe

I have a simple Powershell script to stop these processes, but the problem is I want to close n-1 out of n processes.

> Stop-Process -Force -Name XYZ*

kills n out of n processes.

Is there a way to kill all processes of a program while leaving open the newest (e.g. XYZ.exe #5)?

Use ' Get-Process -name firefox | sort ID' to list them ordered by ID. Then you need to enumerate them and delete all apart the last one. And then add an '| Stop-Process' at the end — Francesco Mantovani
– Francesco Mantovani, Commented Mar 20, 2020 at 20:38

Mathias R. Jessen · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-20 20:34:00Z

2

Use Get-Process to discover all matching processes ahead of time, then simply remove one of them before killing the rest:

Get-Process -Name XYZ* |Select -Skip 1 |Stop-Process -Force

answered Mar 20, 2020 at 20:34

Mathias R. Jessen

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2 Comments

cmac Over a year ago

Is there a way to automate it so I can run it, say at 1 am, with a scheduled task?

Mathias R. Jessen Over a year ago

Sure

Francesco Mantovani · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-20 20:45:13Z

0

Try this: it closes all non responding processes

Get-Process -name XYZ.exe| Where-Object -FilterScript {$_.Responding -eq $false} | Stop-Process

answered Mar 20, 2020 at 20:45

Francesco Mantovani

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