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<\/H2>\n <\/H2>\nHey, Scripting Guy! If I have a bunch of duplicate processes, how can I delete all of them except for the oldest one?
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![\"Script](\"http:\/\/img.microsoft.com\/library\/media\/1033\/technet\/images\/scriptcenter\/ad.jpg\" "\\"Script")
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| \n Note<\/B>. Peter would like us to inform everyone that back in his<\/I> day he didn\u2019t need fancy stuff like Windows and Notepad just to terminate a few processes. Give him a punch card and the good old Univac I and in a few days he\u2019d get rid of those pesky old processes. And he\u2019d do it after walking 10 miles through waist-deep snow just to get to the office in the first place.<\/P><\/TD><\/TR><\/TBODY><\/TABLE>\n As you can see, our script starts out in pretty straightforward fashion, binding to the WMI service on the local computer. (Although this script works equally well against remote machines; all you have to do is assign the name of the remote computer to the variable strComputer.) For this example, we\u2019ve decided that we want to get rid of any \u201cextra\u201d copies of Notepad that might be running. With that in mind, we go ahead execute this query to get back a collection of all the processes that have a Name<\/B> equal to Notepad.exe<\/I>:<\/P> At this point we take a minor detour. Suppose it turns out that we have only one instance of Notepad running; in other words, suppose we don\u2019t have any duplicate processes running after all. If that\u2019s the case we\u2019re assuming that we don\u2019t want to terminate our one and only instance of Notepad. That\u2019s why we stuck in this block of code:<\/P> What we\u2019re doing here is checking the value of the Count<\/B> property to see how many instances of Notepad really are<\/I> up and running. If the Count is less than 2 that means we have, at most, one instance of Notepad running. In that case our work is done: there aren\u2019t any duplicate processes to be terminated. Therefore, we go ahead and call the Wscript.Quit<\/B> method and terminate the script.<\/P>\n Let\u2019s assume, however, that we do<\/I> have multiple instances of Notepad running. In that case we need to figure out which instance is the oldest (that is, which instance was created first), then go ahead and delete all the other instances of Notepad. There are a number of different ways to do this, but we chose the following approach.<\/P>\n The first thing we do is assign the current date and time (using the Now<\/B> function) to a variable named dtmTarget. Why? Well, we\u2019re going to check the creation date and time of each instance of Notepad against this target date and time. Suppose we check the creation time for Notepad instance 1 and find out that it\u2019s older than the value in dtmTarget (which it will be). In that case, Notepad instance 1 becomes our oldest instance of Notepad, and we\u2019ll assign its<\/I> creation date and time to dtmTarget. We\u2019ll then check the creation date and time of Notepad instance 2 against the new value of dtmTarget. What if Notepad instance 2 is \u201cyounger\u201d than dtmTarget? No problem; in that case we just loop around and repeat the process with Notepad instance 3. <\/P>\n If it turns out that Notepad instance 2 is older than dtmTarget then we assign its creation date and time to dtmTarget. That means that, for the moment at least, Notepad instance 2 is our oldest instance.<\/P>\n Make sense? If not, bear with us; we\u2019ll show you exactly how this all takes place.<\/P>\n After retrieving all the instances of Notepad we set up a For Each loop to walk through each item in the collection. The first thing we do inside that loop is assign the value of the process CreationDate property to a variable named dtmDateHolder:<\/P> This is where things get a little messy. The value of the CreationDate property \u2013 like most WMI date-time values \u2013 is stored using the Universal Time Coordinate (UTC) format; that means that dtmDateHolder is going to be equal to something like this:<\/P> Needless to say, there\u2019s not a lot we can do with a UTC value, at least not in that particular format. Instead, we need to convert this to a \u201creal\u201d date-time value. That\u2019s what this block of code is for:<\/P> |