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Difficulty: Very hardMicrosoft Command-Line Tools

A Windows workstation is experiencing severe performance degradation because a frozen application process with PID 3944 (`DataSync.exe`) has spawned multiple unresponsive background worker threads. A systems administrator opens an elevated Command Prompt and needs to forcibly terminate the parent process along with all of its spawned child processes in a single command. Which command should the administrator execute to achieve this objective?

  1. taskkill /pid 3944 /f /tAnswer
  2. B
    taskkill /im DataSync.exe /f /s
  3. C
    kill -9 3944 --children
  4. D
    tasklist /fi "PID eq 3944" /kill

Answer

The command taskkill /pid 3944 /f /t forcefully terminates process ID 3944 along with all child processes started by it.
The correct command uses `taskkill` specifying the PID (`/pid 3944`), the force switch (`/f`) to terminate unresponsive tasks, and the tree switch (`/t`) to terminate all child worker processes spawned by the parent process.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the target process identifier (PID) and termination requirements.
Target PID is 3944, required parameters are forced closure and recursive child process termination.
Standard process termination may hang if a process is frozen, requiring an aggressive force flag.
2
Select the appropriate native Windows command-line utility for process termination.
The `taskkill` utility is selected.
`tasklist` only views tasks, while Unix commands like `kill` are invalid in standard Windows Command Prompt.
3
Apply the correct switches to execute the targeted tree termination.
`taskkill /pid 3944 /f /t` is constructed.
`/pid` specifies target PID 3944, `/f` forces execution, and `/t` specifies process tree (child) termination.

Key Concept

Windows Task Termination Commands and CLI Switches
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Topics

Microsoft Command-Line Tools

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