Batch program to to check if process exists

Question

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?

Answer 1

TASKLIST does not set errorlevel.

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

should do the job, since ":" should appear in TASKLIST output only if the task is NOT found, hence FIND will set the errorlevel to 0 for not found and 1 for found

Nevertheless,

taskkill /f /im "notepad.exe"

will kill a notepad task if it exists - it can do nothing if no notepad task exists, so you don't really need to test - unless there's something else you want to do...like perhaps

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

which would appear to do as you ask - kill the notepad process if it exists, then exit - otherwise continue with the batch