How to Correctly Check if a Process is running and Stop it

Question

What is the correct way of determining if a process is running, for example FireFox, and stopping it?

I did some looking around and the best way I found was this:

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Answer 1

@jmp242 - the generic System.Object type does not contain the CloseMainWindow method, but statically casting the System.Diagnostics.Process type when collecting the ProcessList variable works for me. Updated code (from this answer) with this casting (and looping changed to use ForEach-Object) is below.

function Stop-Processes {
    param(
        [parameter(Mandatory=$true)] $processName,
                                     $timeout = 5
    )
    [System.Diagnostics.Process[]]$processList = Get-Process $processName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

    ForEach ($Process in $processList) {
        # Try gracefully first
        $Process.CloseMainWindow() | Out-Null
    }

    # Check the 'HasExited' property for each process
    for ($i = 0 ; $i -le $timeout; $i++) {
        $AllHaveExited = $True
        $processList | ForEach-Object {
            If (-NOT $_.HasExited) {
                $AllHaveExited = $False
            }                    
        }
        If ($AllHaveExited -eq $true){
            Return
        }
        Start-Sleep 1
    }
    # If graceful close has failed, loop through 'Stop-Process'
    $processList | ForEach-Object {
        If (Get-Process -ID $_.ID -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) {
            Stop-Process -Id $_.ID -Force -Verbose
        }
    }
}