Ending task in task manager works, but taskkill in cmd does not. Why?

Question

I need to terminate a software every time it is done transcoding a movie file. To automate this I made a small batch script. Therein I tried to use taskkill like this:

taskkill /im taskname.exe /t /f

But I always get the following error message: ERROR: The process with PID 6708 could not be terminated. Reason: There is no running instance of the task.

I also tried to start the cmd window as administrator and I also tried PowerShell. But when I do tasklist afterwards, it still shows the task.

Funny thing is that the task gets instantly terminated when I right-click on it in the task manager and end task. Which command does the "end task" call in the task manager? Something I can use to automate in a batch file?

Answer 1

As suggested by barlop the third party command line app nircmd.exe did the job!

nircmd.exe killprocess processname

Answer 2

If you cannot kill it by name, but have Process ID, you can try to kill it by PID:

for /f "delims== tokens=2" %%i in ('WMIC process where "Name='process.exe'" get ProcessId /value') do set pid=%%i 
echo Going to kill PID: %pid%
taskkill.exe /PID %pid%