Part of the reason I haven’t written anything lately, is that I just built the gaming PC I’ve been waiting to get for the past 3+ years. After waiting that long, I’m making good use of it!
One of the first things I did was to boot up Fallout 4 and explore the wastes… Until it crashes, of course. Not sure what it is about the series, but I always end up playing for a random amount of time before the game crashes and locks up my system, in this case allowing me to see all my applications, but not view the actual windows.
PowerShell to the rescue!
After the latest crash, I found myself staring at my computer thinking, “Really? I can open task-manager, I just can’t interact with it using a mouse, so I can’t kill Fallout! Wait a minute… Since when do I need a mouse?”
| Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.ProcessName -like '*fall*' } | Stop-Process |
Fortunately, Fallout has a fairly distinct process name. Next time someone’s software tries to eat your computer, don’t get mad. Kill it with fire! (Fire, or PowerShell. Please note: PowerShell is probably far less destructive in the long-run.)
Update:
For the busy developer who just doesn’t have time to enter all those characters, the shorthand is much simpler:
| gps '*fall*' | kill |
Fun times with Functions 