What tool can you use to stop a program

This post digs out 3 ways to force close a program without Task Manager. After a while, the crashed program will be forced to close. Free Download. This guide shows you how to open and use Google Chrome task manager. Step 1. Active Oldest Votes. Type cmd in the Run box and click Enter. Use the command tasklist to list all processes.

Improve this answer. MJ9 MJ9 1, 1 1 gold badge 7 7 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. You're totally right! You can straight type taskkill there! I forgot that it is an executable placed inside system32 if I remember correctly. This means, a huge reduction of steps. Show 15 more comments. Run5k Run5k 15k 23 23 gold badges 45 45 silver badges 61 61 bronze badges. That is a very good point. There isn't an additional prompt in some cases, but a program that is frozen will typically have one.

I have added an additional step to the answer. In my version of Task Manager Win 10 Home , the Delete key to kill a process pops up with the "are you sure you want to do this?

I'd be interested to know which systems this doesn't always appear for. Each of them closes without any additional prompts.

This works! Thank you. I have a few choices for the correct answer here. I hope you don't mind me picking one with fewer votes.

The arrow keys wouldn't respond the first time I tried your solution, so I'm going to say the other one is more consistent, and it has some good info about using the command prompt.

Show 8 more comments. If I recall, it ignores important processes at least on Windows I didn't know that it accepted a wildcard. This reminds me of a very dumb thing I did when I started working: I had to write a script that killed some processes of which I had the PID, on a Unix machine. I don't remember the details, but I was parsing the output of ps -ef with a regex containing the PID, and if it matched I had to send a kill Now, for some reason, my regex didn't match, so I tried to make it "broader".

It didn't work. This will kill all the processes with the name gedit. It has the option to ignore case using -I :. To learn more about various flags provided by killall such as -u , which allows you to kill user-owned processes check the man page man killall. Have you ever encountered an issue where a media player, such as VLC , grayed out or hung? Now you can find the PID and kill the application using one of the commands listed above or use xkill. Simply execute xkill in a terminal, which should change the mouse cursor to an x or a tiny skull icon.

Click x on the window you want to close. Be careful using xkill , though—as its man page explains, it can be dangerous. You have been warned! Refer to the man page of each command for more information. You can also explore commands like pkill and pgrep. If none of the above work sometimes a process refuses to die remember that a computers attention span is only as long as its power cable. Indeed - vlc will still hang after all these years like popping the DVD during play. And when it comes to technology, unexpected issues, like an application freezing up, can bring your day to a halt.

After all, if the problem app won't close, you have no choice but to deal with it right away. If you have a Windows computer, the force-quit option is a useful tool in that circumstance. Be aware that if you don't complete step one of this method, your computer — rather than the app — will shut down. You'll then see a Preparing security settings window, along with a list of available options.

Type cmd into the search box and press Enter. Type tasklist into the Command Prompt. You'll then see a list of tasks and programs running on your computer.