When in the command prompt: I am looking for a Windows equivalent of CTRL+C in unix and mac to force exit a program in a command prompt. Sometimes my program would just infinitaly wait for... something and I would like to close it without hitting CTRL+ALT+DELETE and force quitting the windows command prompt. Thanks!
14 Answers
Ctrl + C will stop a program running from the command prompt, similar to other operating systems.
To force kill a process from the command prompt, use the following command:
taskkill /F /IM process.exe
/F will force termination, /IM means you're going to provide the executable (image) name, and process.exe is the process to end.
Actually, it's Ctrl+C on Windows too. Ctrl+Break usually works as well, but with some commands it has some interesting differing semantics compared to Ctrl+C (see ping -t for example).
Normally, that would be CTRL-BREAK (the PAUSE/BREAK key on a 101-key keyboard) but I think this can be disabled.
Give it a shot.
But this isn't really a programming question so I'm voting to shift it to superuser.
1Command to exit command prompt:
taskkill /IM cmd.exe
