My PC was behaving sluggishly the other day. I tried to be patient, but had to fire up the task manager when I could bear it no longer. That’s when I noticed great gobs of my swap file allocated to “SVCHOST.EXE”:

The problem is, SVCHOST is a catch all windows service container. Meaning, many windows services run under the same instance of SVCHOST. How was I going to figure out which services might be the culprit?

Enter the tasklist command.

Tasklist displays info about running tasks, including SVCHOST.

Simply running tasklist at the command prompt displays a laundry list of all running processes. This wasn’t going to do it, so I ran it with the “/?” switch to try and find how to narrow the info…

/SVC Displays services hosted in each process.
/FI filter Displays a set of tasks that match a given criteria specified by the filter.

Looks good so far, now I need to know what filter to apply:

Filters:
    Filter Name     Valid Operators           Valid Value(s)
    -----------     ---------------           --------------------------
    IMAGENAME       eq, ne                    Image name

OK, this gives us:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ SCVHOST.EXE”

But it seems the filter is case sensitive, because when I run that command, I get this:

INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.

So, switching to lower case gives me what I want:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ svchost.exe”

Image Name     PID        Services
=========== =====  =======================
svchost.exe     744        DcomLaunch
svchost.exe     844        RpcSs
svchost.exe     888        AeLookupSvc, AppMgmt,
                                    AudioSrv, BITS, Browser,
                                    CryptSvc, dmserver,
                                    EventSystem,lanmanserver,
                                    lanmanworkstation, Netman,
                                    Nla, RasMan, Schedule,
                                    seclogon, SENS,ShellHWDetection,
                                    Themes, winmgmt, wuauserv
svchost.exe     928         Dhcp, Dnscache
svchost.exe     976         LmHosts, W32Time
svchost.exe     1772       Net Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     1816       Pml Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     2424       TermService
svchost.exe     3312       TapiSrv
svchost.exe     2688       W3SVC

From there, it’s just a matter of shutting down or restarting each of the services listed under the process id 888 ( I got this from taskmanager).

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While performing a disk cleanup recently, I had cause to locate and delete any empty folders under a root folder. I knew there had to be a batch file command to accomplish this, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was!

Enter Google.

five minutes of some keyword searching with surgical precision and piecing together commands yielded my solution.

DIR /AD/B/S | SORT > FOLDERLIST.BAT

How It Works.

The Dir command is the familiar directory list command that comes standard with all versions of Windows since 95. The magic is in the switches:

/A Displays files with specified attributes.
When applied to the “D” attribute, it returns directories
/B Uses bare format (no heading information or summary).
/S Displays files in specified directory and all subdirectories.

SORT is an often overlooked command for, you guessed it, sorting. Here, the results of the Dir command are piped (”|”) into the SORT command as input. The result of the SORT command is then redirected from the command prompt to a file called FOLDERLIST.BAT.

Kick it up a notch.

Now that you’ve created this list, say you want to automate the deletion of each entry in the list. This is where pumping the output to a “.bat” file comes in. Open the bat file in textpad, or notepad, or your text editor

For example:

Typing:
DIR /AD/B/S | SORT > FOLDERLIST.BAT

in my C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC folder yields the following results:

Next, open the file in a text editor, word, or open office and replace the beginning of each line with the RD command followed by a space and a single quote. Like so:

This should give you the following:

Notice how each line now begins with “RD “” This is the old DOS Remove Directory command. Don’t worry, it only removes empty directories. But you still need to add an ending quote to each line. This is where Word or Open Office is handy. You can do another search and replace, but this time search for “^p” (new paragraph) and replace with ““^p” (end quote and new paragraph).

Save the file, and you’re all done except the double clicking.

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