How can i take a user dump using powershell

Question

I want to take user dump of a process using powershell How can i do it? The same I get on rightclicking the process in Taskmanager

Answer 1

Hi sorry I'm not much help. I've never used a DUP file before. But there is a WMI class called Win32_Process:

Get-WMIObject -Class Win32_Process

Not sure if that's the info you are looking for. Has different properties than Get-Process.

Answer 2

The easiest way is to use Procdump from Sysinternals toolkit. Use Get-Process to get process id, which you can pass to Procdump for actual dumping.

Edit:

I'd still rather use readily available tools instead of the hard way. Have you got a valid business reason? Since you insist, there is a Win32 API call that creates user mode memory dumps. It can be invoked from .Net code, so either use P/Invoke or embed C# into your Powershell code. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Answer 3

I had a similar use case where I needed to create a dump for an IIS process. Granted I could have used DebugDiag, but I ended up going down this path. Here's what I used (and works pretty well, I should add):

$procid = Get-Process | Where-Object {$_.ProcessName -eq 'w3wp'} | Select-Object ProcessName,Id
New-Item -Path "c:\temp\Dumps" -Type directory -Force
cmd.exe /c "c:\temp\procdump64.exe" $procid.id -accepteula -mp "c:\temp\Dumps"

Furthermore, you could use these dump files for analysis using DebugDiag too. So it's a win-win in my opinion.

PS: Theoretically, one could also get the Process ID using the Get-CimInstance cmdlet. So something like this would also work:

Get-CimInstance -Query "SELECT * from Win32_Process WHERE name LIKE 'w3wp%'"