I accidently did a cd-drive vbs prank on myself on windows 10 and I can't find the wscript.exe file.. Is there any way to end this program?
5 Answers
Your script probably runs elevated so could become invisible in normal unelevated task manager. Run it elevated as well.
Another approach: open an elevated command line window. Then, taskkill /? could suggest a solution (or read taskkill: End one or more processes by process ID or image name article).
To find process ID of any running Windows scripting engine i.e either wscript.exe or cscript.exe, type
tasklist | findstr /I "PID script.exe"
and search for .vbs i.e. VBScript file extension:
wmic process where "CommandLine like '%.vbs%' and name != 'wmic.exe'" get /value
and search for your script file name (let's say cdprank.vbs):
wmic process where "CommandLine like '%cdprank%' and name != 'wmic.exe'" get /value
Best option according to me is
1) Open Task Manager
2) Go to the processes tab
3) Right-click on Name header and click command line (to show Command line)
4) Under command line look for "C:\Windows\System32\WScript.exe" "yourfilename.vbs"
5) Right-click and end task
Look for something called "Microsoft Windows Based Script Host" in the running processes. End this process and you should be fine.
Look for a process called "microsoft windows based script host" in task manager on the process tab. End task the process and your done
For Windows 10 TaskManager>Details search for wscript.exe Right click and select End Process tree.
