Knowing which java.exe process to kill on a windows machine [closed]

Question

When a java based application starts to misbehave on a windows machine, you want to be able to kill the process in the task manager if you can't quit the application normally. Most of the time, there's more than one java based application running on my machine. Is there a better way than just randomly killing java.exe processes in hope that you'll hit the correct application eventually?

EDIT: Thank you to all the people who pointed me to Sysinternal's Process Explorer - Exactly what I'm looking for!

Answer 1

Run jps -lv which shows PIDs and command lines of all running Java processes.

Determine PID of the task you want to kill. Then use command:

taskkill /PID <pid> 

to kill the misbehaving process.

Answer 2

Download Sysinternal's Process Explorer. It's a task manager much more powerfull than Windows's own manager.

One of it's features is that you can see all the resources that each process is using (like registry keys, hard disk directories, named pipes, etc). So, browsing the resources that each java.exe process holds might help you determine wich one you want to kill. I usually find out by looking for the one that's using a certain log file directory.