Windows Batch file - taskkill if window title contains text

uesports135 picture uesports135 · Oct 24, 2014 · Viewed 17.9k times · Source

I want to write a simple batch file to kill a process that contains certain text in the window title. Right now I have:

taskkill /fi "Windowtitle eq XXXX*" /im cmd.exe  

And that works, except what I want to do is use the wildcard both at the beginning AND end of the title. So something like:

taskkill /fi "Windowtitle eq \*X*" /im cmd.exe  

But I tried this and it does not work. Is there something I'm missing or is this not possible?

Answer

MC ND picture MC ND · Oct 24, 2014

No, wildcards are not allowed at the start of the filter.

for /f "tokens=2 delims=," %%a in ('
    tasklist /fi "imagename eq cmd.exe" /v /fo:csv /nh 
    ^| findstr /r /c:".*X[^,]*$"
') do taskkill /pid %%a

This will retrieve the list of tasks, in csv and verbose format (that will include window title as the last field in the output).

The list is filtered by findstr with a regular expression that will search the indicated text (the X) in the last field.

If any line matches the filter, the for will tokenize it, retrieving the second field (the PID) that will be used in taskkill to end the process.