Windows

Dec 2, 2008

My Digital Life Editorial Team

17 Comments

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How to Get and View Process Identifier (Process ID or PID) on Windows

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Process identifier, or more commonly know as PID or process ID, is a unique number tagged with each processes running on a system, and used by some operating system kernels, such as UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) to identify a process.

In Unix-like and Linux operating system, ps command can be used to search for the PID for a particular running process, by grepping the output. In Windows operating system such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, there is no such utility or command available though.

In order to get to know, or view, retrieve and identify the process ID or PID of the processes running in Windows operating system, users or administrators can make use of Task Manager. However, Task Manager does not display PID information by default. To display the PID value in Task Manager, go to Processes tab, click on View menu, then click on Select Columns…. In the “Select Columns” or “Select Process Page Columns” dialog, tick and check the checkbox for PID (Process Identifier), and click OK.

To run Task Manager, use Taskmgr command or right click on Taskbar, and select “Task Manager”.

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17 Comments

• 
  JEEVA January 3, 2012 at 12:05 pm

  thx….. useful website and useful info

  Reply
• 
  Hari November 4, 2011 at 11:29 pm

  This is really useful, thank you.

  Reply
• 
  sas September 9, 2011 at 11:04 pm

  Thanks For this post.

  Reply
• 
  david April 19, 2011 at 5:24 pm

  In Windows 2000 the "utility or command" to get PIDs is tlist. In later versions, it is TaskList

  Reply
• 
  Vaasu April 10, 2011 at 10:39 pm

  Thx

  Reply
• 
  jeff April 1, 2011 at 2:34 pm

  I followed the instructions you provided, and clicked the PID box, but I don't see the number anywhere. Ok, so what happens after I click OK. Where do I go to see this magic number.

  Reply
• 
  samar January 26, 2011 at 8:35 am

  Thank you soooooooooooooooooooo much .. it really helped me .. you saved me )

  Reply
• 
  g October 21, 2010 at 9:09 am

  great thanks everyone!

  Reply
• 
  ZACH August 12, 2010 at 11:02 pm

  THANKS ALOT GUYS.

  USEFULL INFO.

  Reply
• 
  Jhonathan Correa July 13, 2010 at 3:36 am

  Nice text, but there's a mistake cause there's a way to get the pid by command in windows:

  The command is: "qprocess"

  And like in the linux and unix, there's another command to kill the process by PID: "tskill numberPID".

  See you.

  Reply
• 
  Hanmant June 21, 2010 at 10:15 pm

  Thank u,

  further, can i use this pid number in my java code?

  Reply
• 
  3bolah March 9, 2010 at 12:00 am

  Hi,

  Thank you for the info

  but I have one question:

  Can I use the PID to scan the memory?

  thanks

  Reply
• 
  Lekshmi January 29, 2010 at 5:39 am

  Nice information…..

  Thanx

  Reply
• 
  rohit August 19, 2009 at 4:30 am

  thx a lot for your help!!

  Reply
• 
  Scott July 23, 2009 at 1:49 pm

  I'll stick with tasklist and taskkill

  thanks for nothing.

  Reply
• 
  siri April 20, 2009 at 2:27 am

  Thanks for the info

  Reply
• 
  montana December 19, 2008 at 5:23 pm

  alternatively one could use the sysinternals pslist.exe readily available with a quick web search on your favorite search engine

  regards

  .mlp+

  Reply