Tools You Should Use: Tasklist

Day to day we all use many different systems and tools. Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Twitter, Facebook, Powershell, Visual Studio, Sublime Text, iTunes, and the list goes on and on. There are so many cool utilities and tools out there, and many people aren’t aware of the majority of them, but at one point or another, they could benefit from using them..

The first tool/utility I’d like to tell you about is: tasklist (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491010.aspx)

tasklist is a cmd line utility built into windows that you can use to see running processes. With any utility, run “tasklist /?” to see options. You can
run it with /S and pass in a remote system name, pretty cool. Also authenticated using /U and /P. You can see many other options as well. Format, Verbose, etc.

You can use this to get the running processes on a remote system. Want an easy way to see who might be remoted (RDP) into a machine?
tasklist /s COMPUTERNAME /v /FI "ImageName eq Explorer.exe"

Pretty cool huh? Just think of the other possibilities. Log the running tasks to a csv and track over time with memory usage. Check remotely for a process running. tasklist should be able to help. And used in conjunction with other tools, you can do a lot of remote admin work.