PowerShell saves the day again
I recently posted
the night PowerShell saved my music library. Well, he saved the day again last week.
Whilst carrying my laptop to the coffee shop at Microsoft's Offices in Reading, I accidentally managed to start 63 instances of the excellent
TcpTrace application.
Yup, 63! No idea how.
Worst thing was, this application starts with a modal dialog so I couldn't even close group on the taskbar.
And you can't multi-select in the task manager to kill multiple processes. You can't even do this in the fantastic Process Explorer.
Time for Powershell
Needless to say, PowerShell made mince-meat of 'em.
First of all, I used the get-process cmdlet to look at all the processes:
get-process
Then I applied a filter to ensure I only had the tcpTrace processes
get-process tcptrace
Easy. Now I just pipe this to a foreach and Kill() those processes.
get-process tcptrace | foreach { $_.Kill() }
All gone! Hoorah.
Later I found the stop-process cmdlet which could have done this in one easy move:
stop-process tcptrace
If you want to try this yourself, why not get Powershell to start 63 applications for you!
for ($i=0; $i -ile 63; $i++) { c:\tools\tcptrace\tcptrace.exe }
Awesome.