Another Way to Run Programs

Executing programs on a remote machine is a common administrative task, and various tools are available to perform the job. Sysinternals' PsExec tool is a powerful example. (For more information, see "PsExec," Windows IT Pro, July 2004, InstantDoc ID 42919.) I also created a script, JTRun.vbs, that uses Microsoft's jt.exe and the Task Scheduler service. (For more information, see "Command-Line Task Scheduler," March 2005, InstantDoc ID 45148.)

With some restrictions, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) can also run programs locally or on a remote computer. Table 1 shows some of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. In this article, I'll present a script that uses WMI to run programs either locally or remotely. It can also optionally wait for the program to end and display its run time.

The RunProgram.vbs Command
RunProgram.vbs uses WMI's Win32_ProcessStartup and Win32_Process objects to run a program either locally or remotely. You can download the script by going to http://www.windowsitpro.com/windowsscripting, entering 48218 in the InstantDoc ID text box, and clicking the 48218.zip hotlink. RunProgram.vbs requires Windows 2000 with Windows Script Host (WSH) 5.6 or Windows XP or later. (WSH 5.6 is preinstalled on XP and later.) The syntax for the launch command is

RunProgram.vbs "command"
  [/startin:path]
  [/window:n]
  [/computer:computer
  [/username:username]
  [/password:password]]
  [/wait [/elapsed]]

The command argument specifies the command line to execute. Make sure to enclose it in double quotes (""). The command name at the beginning of the command line must be an executable, so if you need to run a cmd.exe command (e.g., Dir, Copy) or a cmd.exe shell script, start the command with cmd /c. If you need to run a WSH script, start the command with cscript or wscript. . . .