sktask

A task manager for Windows that answers instantly on a machine too loaded to answer. Zero dependencies, no WMI, no .NET, no PowerShell — raw Win32 only.

> sktask -g
RAM 20601/32325 MB (63%)   processes 257   hung 0

GROUP                   MEM MB     CPU%   PROCS
Browsers/WebView2         3926      0.0      70
Claude Code               2088      0.0       6
Other                     1503      0.0     108
Dev tooling               1121      0.0      22
Windows shell              835      0.0       5
Diagnostic litter           16      0.0       2

Why

This was written during a night spent diagnosing a Windows machine that kept freezing. Every reading went through PowerShell, and PowerShell was the problem: on a machine at 87% RAM with 873 processes, Get-Process took over two minutes to return, Get-CimInstance failed outright with "Call cancelled", and each attempt spawned another process competing with the thing being measured.

The diagnosis that mattered — 350 orphaned processes holding 3.7 GB — was missed three times because the output had to be scraped from formatted tables.

sktask exists so that never happens again. It is a 230 KB binary with no dependencies that starts in milliseconds and can emit JSON.

Install

Download sktask.exe from Releases and put it on your PATH. Or build it:

cargo build --release

No network needed at build time — there are no dependencies to fetch. That is deliberate: a diagnostic tool you cannot build on a broken machine is useless.

Usage

sktask                     what is running, biggest first
sktask -g                  where is my memory actually going
sktask -c -n 10            what is burning CPU right now
sktask --hung              is the shell hung, or actually dead
sktask -f chrome           every chrome process
sktask -k 13624            kill one process by PID
sktask -k chrome --force   kill every chrome process
sktask -j                  JSON, for scripts and agents
sktask -w                  watch mode, 2s refresh
sktask --help              full help

Flag	Meaning
-n <N>	show top N (default 20)
-c	sample CPU over 300 ms, sort by CPU
-g	group by application family
-f <pat>	filter by name substring
--hung	only non-responding processes
-k <pat|pid>	kill by name substring or PID
--force	permit -k to kill more than 5 matches
-j	JSON output
-w	watch, refresh every 2 s

Design

--hung is the feature worth having. Distinguishing a hung shell from a crashed one changes the fix entirely, and nothing in the portable process APIs exposes it. sktask enumerates visible windows with EnumWindows, tests each with IsHungAppWindow, and maps the results back to PIDs.

CPU sampling is opt-in. CPU time is a delta between two samples, so it costs 300 ms. The default path skips it, which is why plain sktask returns immediately.

Kills are verified. TerminateProcess only requests termination and returns straight away. sktask re-enumerates afterwards and reports what actually died, rather than reporting success for a process still running.

Killing explorer.exe restarts the shell. Windows does not reliably do this itself, and the result is a desktop with no taskbar.

Grouping includes a Diagnostic litter category for taskkill, tasklist and sktask itself — orphaned diagnostic processes are exactly the kind of thing that hides in a flat process list.

Limitation

Protected processes — MsMpEng (Defender), parts of System — cannot be opened by a non-elevated caller, so their memory is not counted. The summary line reports how many were skipped:

processes 257   hung 0   inaccessible 4 (run elevated)

Run from an elevated shell for a complete picture.

Licence

AGPL-3.0 with the Commons Clause. Source-available, free for personal and non-commercial use; commercial use requires a separate agreement. See LICENSE.