taskkill window spaces in its title name

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I’ve had similar problems, but found out a little bit more.

Problem

I have been trying to close a CMD window (run as administrator) which has set its own window title. So, run CMD as administrator and type:

title CMD with custom title

After much faffing, the following command showed me that setting the window title puts a leading space in front of the title! (No idea why.)

c:\>tasklist /V /FI "WindowTitle eq Administrator*"

Image Name  PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage Status  User Name       CPU Time Window Title
========== ==== ============ ======== ========= ======= =============== ======== =====================================
cmd.exe    4304 Console             1   2,492 K Running MACHINE\My Name  0:00:00 Administrator:  CMD with custom title
                                                                                               🡹
(scroll 🡺)                                                                               extra space

Solution

So to kill the process:

taskkill /F /FI "WindowTitle eq  Administrator:  CMD with custom title" /T
                                               🡹
                                             bingo
  • /F – use the force.
  • /T – kill child-processes.

If you’re banging your head in a similar fashion, I recommend using tasklist to poke around inside the process properties to make sure you’re getting your filters right. This ballache brought to you by Windows 8.

Note: if the title contains quotation marks, just escape the nested ones:

title "CMD with custom title"

taskkill /F /FI "WindowTitle eq  Administrator:  \"CMD with custom title\"" /T

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