[windows] Batch program to to check if process exists

I want a batch program, which will check if the process notepad.exe exists.

if notepad.exe exists, it will end the process,

else the batch program will close itself.

Here is what I've done:

@echo off
tasklist /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" > nul
if errorlevel 1 taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe"
exit

But it doesn't work. What is the wrong in my code?

That's why it's not working because you code something that is not right, that's why it always exit and the script executer will read it as not operable batch file that prevent it to exit and stop so it must be

tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq Notepad.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "Notepad.exe">NUL
if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
msg * Program is running
goto Exit
)
else if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="1" (
msg * Program is not running
goto Exit
)

rather than

@echo off
tasklist /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" > nul
if errorlevel 1 taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe"
exit

TASKLIST doesn't set an exit code that you could check in a batch file. One workaround to checking the exit code could be parsing its standard output (which you are presently redirecting to NUL). Apparently, if the process is found, TASKLIST will display its details, which include the image name too. Therefore, you could just use FIND or FINDSTR to check if the TASKLIST's output contains the name you have specified in the request. Both FIND and FINDSTR set a non-null exit code if the search was unsuccessful. So, this would work:

@echo off
tasklist /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" | find /i "notepad.exe" > nul
if not errorlevel 1 (taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe") else (
  specific commands to perform if the process was not found
)
exit

There's also an alternative that doesn't involve TASKLIST at all. Unlike TASKLIST, TASKKILL does set an exit code. In particular, if it couldn't terminate a process because it simply didn't exist, it would set the exit code of 128. You could check for that code to perform your specific actions that you might need to perform in case the specified process didn't exist:

@echo off
taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe" > nul
if errorlevel 128 (
  specific commands to perform if the process
  was not terminated because it was not found
)
exit

This is a one line solution.

It will run taskkill only if the process is really running otherwise it will just info that it is not running.

tasklist | find /i "notepad.exe" && taskkill /im notepad.exe /F || echo process "notepad.exe" not running.

This is the output in case the process was running:

notepad.exe           1960 Console                   0    112,260 K
SUCCESS: The process "notepad.exe" with PID 1960 has been terminated.

This is the output in case not running:

process "notepad.exe" not running.

Try this:

@echo off
set run=
tasklist /fi "imagename eq notepad.exe" | find ":" > nul
if errorlevel 1 set run=yes
if "%run%"=="yes" echo notepad is running
if "%run%"=="" echo notepad is not running
pause