How to Correctly Check if a Process is running and Stop it
If you don't need to display exact result "running" / "not runnuning", you could simply:
ps notepad -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | kill -PassThru
If the process was not running, you'll get no results. If it was running, you'll receive get-process
output, and the process will be stopped.
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