Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Windows task manager

Having trouble figuring out which process is which in taskManager

Obviously there is also sysInternal ProcExp, however this isn't always available if you are troubleshooting a Production issue

heres some tips
wmic process list
or for more specifric fields you can use Get
WMIC PROCESS get Caption,Commandline,Processid
http://stackoverflow.com/a/12850419/249672

If you want to get more information from a process (such as command line used to start it), then you can combine this with TaskMgr. (First add processId to the list of attributes that TaskMgr displays), then correlate it with ist from wmic
e.g. if grep installed on windows
wmic process get commandLine,processId | grep
if grep is not instaled (there seems to be a problem with findStr), you can pipe it to a temp file and use a decent editor such as notepad++
wmic process list > tempFile

Also tasklist is a command line version of taskMgr. It lists PID, and memory usage, so if you can't add PID to the taskManager (apparenty can't in windows server 2003), then you can correlate the memoryUsage back to taskManager and get the PID that way. (Note taskList has some other options  that may help)