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How to Start & Stop Process from Windows Command Line

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From the Command Prompt or PowerShell command line, you can start and stop any process in Windows 10. Here’re the exact steps you should follow to do that.

When you start a program in Windows, it automatically starts all the processes it needs to function. However, some programs might fail to start a process due to any number of reasons like locked files, not enough permissions, etc. Not only that but there might be times when you need to start or stop a process manually from the command line. For instance, to apply changes or fix frozen File Explorer, you need to manually kill and start the Windows Explorer process.

No matter the reason, if you ever want to, follow the steps given below to start and stop any process from Command Prompt or PowerShell command line.

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The steps shown below will work in Windows 7 and 8 too.

How to Start or Stop a Process in Command Prompt

While using the Command Prompt, follow these steps to quickly start or start a process in Windows 10.

To start a process in Command Prompt:

  1. Open the Command Prompt window from the Start menu.
  2. In the cmd window, execute “start “C:\path\to\process.exe”“. Replace the dummy path with the actual path of the process.
    Start-process-from-command-prompt-180820
  3. Most system processes don’t require the full path. For example, you can start Windows Explorer by simply typing “start explorer.exe“.
  4. Once the process is started, you can close the Command Prompt window.

To kill or stop a process in Command Prompt:

  1. Open the Command Prompt window.
  2. Here, type “taskkill /im process.exe” and press Enter. Replace “process.exe” with the actual process name.
    Stop-kill-process-from-command-prompt-180820
  3. You can also stop or kill a task using its Process ID. Use the “taskkill /F /PID pid_number” command. You can get the process ID by typing the “tasklist” command or from the task manager.
    Kill-task-with-process-id-command-prompt-180820
  4. To stop all Not Responding processes, use the “taskkill /f /fi” command. It will force close all non-responsive processes.

Note: To start the process with admin rights, start the Command Prompt as an administrator. When you execute the command in the admin Command Prompt window, the process will automatically start with admin rights.

How to Start or Stop a Process in PowerShell

PowerShell users can follow these steps to stop or start a process in the command line.

To start a process in PowerShell:

  1. First, open the PowerShell window.
  2. Here, execute the “Start-Process process.exe” command to start a process. Don’t forget to replace the dummy process name with the actual process name.
    Start-process-from-powershell-180820
  3. As soon as you execute the command, the process will start with the account permissions.

To kill or stop a process in PowerShell:

  1. Open the PowerShell.
  2. To stop a process via PowerShell, you need its process ID. To get the process ID, execute the “Get-Process” command. You can see the process ID under the ID column.
    List-processes-in-powershell-180820
  3. Once you have the process ID, execute the “stop-process -id <Process-ID>” command to stop the target process. Don’t forget to replace “<Process-ID>” with the actual process ID you got earlier.
  4. After killing the process, you can close the PowerShell window.

One good thing about PowerShell is that it allows you to attach arguments to the Start-Process cmdlet. You can check out this official documentation on how to use those arguments.

Note: To start the process with admin rights, start the PowerShell as an administrator. When you execute the command in the admin PowerShell window, the process will automatically start with admin rights.

I hope that helps. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible.

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