You might wonder how everyone checks the process status of their Windows machines. For a quick look, Task Manager or Resource Monitor is probably your go-to.
They are visually straightforward, but sometimes you might want more detailed information like in Linux.
Task Manager
Resource Monitor
In such cases, the 'tasklist' command is quite handy.
You can display additional information with options or output in CSV format for flexible use. This article introduces the tasklist command (I used Windows 11 in this article, but the behavior is the same for Windows 10).
Examples of using the tasklist command
Start by launching the command prompt and entering the 'tasklist' command without overthinking.
tasklistThis will display a list of processes.
(Refer to the official documentation)
By default, it only shows five items: "Image Name," "PID," "Session Name," "Session," and "Memory Usage." If you want more details, you can add options.
You can display help as the following.
tasklist /?Displaying the details
Adding /v gives you a variety of information.
tasklist /vYou can see memory usage, status, and runtime at once.
Displaying processes using over 100MB of memory
This is handy when you quickly want to identify processes using a lot of memory.
tasklist /fi "memusage gt 100000"
Output processes in CSV format
You can also output in comma-separated values. TABLE (default) and LIST are also available.
tasklist /v /fo csv
It might look cluttered at first, but if you paste it directly into a spreadsheet, you can easily view and sort the data, which is very convenient.
Search by module name
This might not be used as often, but you can display processes for modules starting with, for example, "win*".
tasklist /m win*
By utilizing these commands, you can identify processes with high memory usage and conduct detailed investigations of what processes are running.
You should give it a try!
This blog post is translated from a blog post written by Kawa Ken on our Japanese website Beyond Co..