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

The way you're doing it you're querying for the process twice. Also Lynn raises a good point about being nice first. I'd probably try something like the following:

# get Firefox process
$firefox = Get-Process firefox -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
if ($firefox) {
  # try gracefully first
  $firefox.CloseMainWindow()
  # kill after five seconds
  Sleep 5
  if (!$firefox.HasExited) {
    $firefox | Stop-Process -Force
  }
}
Remove-Variable firefox