How to capture the PID of a process when launching it in DOS

Question

Is there a way to do this purely in a .bat file? The purpose is to launch iexplore, then kill just that instance when it's finished..

Answer 1

Ummm, TaskList & TaskKill?!

Answer 2

I think you can't do that with simple command line utilities, as IE actually spawns child processes for each tab, i.e. if IE is not yet running you would get one parent IE process and a child process for the tab, and if IE is already running you would simply get a single child process.

It will be even quite tricky when you write your own tool to kill IE because when you kill a child (tab) process, IE will automatically recover this tab.

See also this related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1568093/how-to-obtain-process-of-newly-created-ie8-window (though there is no good answer there).

Answer 3

you can use vbscript, here's an example creating notepad, then terminating it using its pid

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set objStartup = objWMIService.Get("Win32_ProcessStartup")
Set objConfig = objStartup.SpawnInstance_
Set objProcess = GetObject("winmgmts:root\cimv2:Win32_Process")
errReturn = objProcess.Create("notepad.exe", null, objConfig, PID)
If errReturn = 0 Then
    WScript.Echo "Process ID is: " & PID
End If 

WScript.Echo "Ready to kill process: " & PID & "? [Y|y]"
Do While Not WScript.StdIn.AtEndOfLine
   strInput = strInput & WScript.StdIn.Read(1)
Loop
If LCase(strInput) = "y" Then
    WScript.Echo "Select * from Win32_Process Where ProcessId = '" & PID & "'"
    Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Process Where ProcessId = '" & PID & "'")
    For Each objProcess in colProcessList
        objProcess.Terminate()
    Next
End If

save as myscript.vbs and on command line

c:\test> cscript /nologo myscript.vbs