How to know process ID or PID on windows

Process Identifier or Process ID or PID is the unique ID of a process running on the system. With PID we can uniquely identify a process and can know about their characteristics.

On unix based system like linux, solaris, HP-UX with "ps" command we can easily identify each type of process and their PID. We can also grep the output for filtering. But for Windows operating system such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 there is no such utility or command.

In windows through GUI we can still see the process ID or PID of a process. This is sometime very essential to track a culprit process. It can be seen from Task Manager. To get Task Manager right click on empty area in the task bar and then you can select Task Manger. You can also get Task Manager window by clicking CTRL+ALT+DEL.

After opening task manager you will see there is no process ID or PID there by default. But you can see Processes tab there. Whenever you click on processes tab, process information is shown. By default option is Image Name(Process Name), User Name(the user under whom process is running), CPU(percentage of CPU usage) and Mem Usage(Total how many KB is allocated to the process).

To get Process ID,
- Click Processes tab.
- Click on View menu, then click on Select Columns.
- In the "Select Columns" or "Select Process Page Columns" dialog, check the checkbox for PID (Process Identifier), and click OK.

You will see PID is shown and you can easily track each process identifier.

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