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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T21:35:13+00:00

EDIT by OP: My question presupposed that PowerShell was the best tool for this

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EDIT by OP: My question presupposed that PowerShell was the best tool for this job. There is a simpler way of achieving my goal. A friend just told me about: iisapp.vbs. It displays exactly the info I need without requiring PowerShell.

I’m working with dozens of ASP.NET websites running locally and when I want to debug a particular website named, for example, foo.site.com I go through the following steps:

  1. Run Process Explorer (from SysInternals) and find which w3wp.exe was started with foo.site.com on its command line.

  2. Note the Process ID (PID) of that w3wp.exe process.

  3. In Visual Studio attach to that process ID.

Is there a way to write a PowerShell script that will print the PID and Command Line Arguments of every w3wp.exe process running on my computer?

When I run get-process w3wp I get:

> get-process w3wp

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
    688      28    44060      64576   226     2.75    196 w3wp
    750      26    48328      68936   225     3.38   1640 w3wp
    989      36    54596      83844   246     4.92   1660 w3wp
    921      33    54344      80576   270     4.24   5624 w3wp
    773      27    48808      72448   244     2.75   5992 w3wp

No Command Line information 🙁

Thanks!

EDIT: I am looking for the command line arguments that were passed to w3wp.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    gwmi win32_process -filter "name='w3wp.exe'" | select name,processId,commandLine

    It should do the trick. I find it weird that powershell doesn’t provide command line information by default. Note : I’ve only tested it in powershell 2.0, but as it use wmi, it should work in 1.0.

    EDIT : the final version used by Tim Stewart (to avoid display problem, see comment) :
    gwmi win32_process -filter "name='powershell.exe'" | format-table -autosize name,processId,commandLine

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