How to find/kill zombie task in taskscheduler

Question

I have a task that runs an exe every minute.

I noticed odd behaviour, and see that the exe is being run twice every minute.

I have "ended" and disabled the task in the taskscheduler. And now I see that this other "zombie" task continues to run every minute.

How can I find and kill it?

Answer 1

Using taskkill will help you with your issue.

The general syntax of the command looks like this:

taskkill [OPTIONS] [PID]

As you might expect, there are plenty of options available for this command. Some of the more helpful options are:

/s COMPUTER -- (Where COMPUTER is the IP or address of a remote computer). The default is the local computer, so if you're working with a command on the local machine, you do not have to use this option.
/u DOMAIN\USER -- (Where DOMAIN is the domain and USER is the username you authenticate to). This option allows you run taskkill with the account permissions of the specified USERNAME or DOMAIN\USERNAME.
/p -- If you use the /u option, you will also need to include the /p option, which allows you to specify the user password.
/fi -- Allows you to run the taskkill command with filters.
/f -- Forces the command to be terminated.
/IM -- Allows you to use an application name instead of the PID (Process ID number) of the application.

This can be seen on CMD by typing taskkill /?

Use the help switch for the taskkill command.

Killing with application name The simplest way to kill a rogue application with taskkill is using the /IM option. This is done like so:

taskkill /IM APPLICATION_NAME

Where APPLICATION_NAME is the name of the application you want to kill. Say, for example, Outlook is refusing to close. To close this with taskkill, you would execute the command:

taskkill /IM outlook.exe

Hope this helps - good luck!