Process management (Get/Stop-Process) in PowerShell - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Process Management with Get-Process and Stop-Process

📖 Scenario: You are managing your computer's running programs. Sometimes, a program uses too much memory or is not responding. You want to find these programs and stop them safely.

🎯 Goal: You will write a PowerShell script that lists running processes, sets a memory usage limit, finds processes using more memory than this limit, and stops those processes.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable with a list of running processes using Get-Process

Create a variable called memoryLimitMB with a value of 100

Use a foreach loop to find processes using more than memoryLimitMB megabytes of memory

Stop those processes using Stop-Process

Print the names of stopped processes

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

System administrators often need to manage processes that use too much memory or cause problems. This script helps automate that task.

💼 Career

Knowing how to list, filter, and stop processes is useful for IT support, system administration, and automation roles.

1

Get the list of running processes

Create a variable called processes and set it to the list of all running processes using Get-Process.

PowerShell

# Create a variable called processes with all running processes
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Get-Process to get all running processes and assign it to processes.

2

Set the memory usage limit

Create a variable called memoryLimitMB and set it to 100 to represent 100 megabytes.

PowerShell

$processes = Get-Process
# Create a variable memoryLimitMB and set it to 100
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 100 to memoryLimitMB.

3

Find and stop processes using too much memory

Use a foreach loop with variable proc to go through processes. Inside the loop, check if proc.WorkingSet / 1MB is greater than memoryLimitMB. If yes, stop the process using Stop-Process -Id $proc.Id and print the process name with Write-Output.

PowerShell

$processes = Get-Process
$memoryLimitMB = 100
# Use foreach loop to check memory and stop processes
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use foreach ($proc in $processes) to loop. Check memory with $proc.WorkingSet / 1MB. Use Stop-Process -Id $proc.Id to stop.

4

Run the script and see stopped processes

Run the script to see the names of processes stopped because they used more than 100 MB memory.

PowerShell

$processes = Get-Process
$memoryLimitMB = 100
foreach ($proc in $processes) {
    if (($proc.WorkingSet / 1MB) -gt $memoryLimitMB) {
        Stop-Process -Id $proc.Id
        Write-Output "Stopped process: $($proc.Name)"
    }
}
# Run the script to see output

Need a hint?

Run the script. If any process uses more than 100 MB, you will see lines like Stopped process: processname.