How to extract a specific field from output of tasklist on the windows command line

Question

I ran the following command on the windows command prompt

C:>tasklist /fi "Imagename eq BitTorrent.exe"

The output of which is

Image Name            PID      Session Name       Session #    Mem Usage
==================  ======== =================   ===========   =========
BitTorrent.exe        6164      Console                   3     24,144K

I need to extract only one field, the PID, i.e. the number 6164 from the above output.

How do I achieve this ? More generally, how do I extract a subset(1/more) of the fields from the output of a command on the windows command line ?

Answer 1

Similar to previous answers, but uses specific switches in tasklist to skip header and behave correctly irrespective of spaces in image names:

for /f "tokens=2 delims=," %F in ('tasklist /nh /fi "imagename eq BitTorrent.exe" /fo csv') do @echo %~F

(as run directly from cmd line, if run from batch replace %F with %%F

Answer 2

the easiest way is with using WMIC:

c:\>wmic process where caption="BitTorrent.exe" get  ProcessId

EDIT: As the WMIC is not part of home editions of windows:

for /f "tokens=1,2 delims= " %A in ('tasklist /fi ^"Imagename eq cmd.exe^" ^| find ^"cmd^"') do echo %B

Here is used CMD of the caption.You can change it in the find and tasklist parameters. If this used in batch file you'll need %%B and %%A