How do I capture the output of a script if it is being ran by the task scheduler

Question

Using Windows Server 2008  how do I go about capturing the output of a script that is being ran with the windows task scheduler   I m testing a rather long custom printing batch-script  and for debugging purposes  I would like to see all of the output from it every night

User · Answer

To supplement  user2744787 s answer  here is a screenshot to show how to use cmd with arguments in a Scheduled Task     Program script  cmd  Add arguments   c run with default port bat  gt  IMQuantWebServices log

User · Answer

This snippet uses wmic exe to build the date string   It isn t mangled by locale settings rem DATE as YYYY-MM-DD via WMIC EXE for  f  quot tokens 2 delims   quot    I in   wmic os get localdatetime  format list   do set datetime   I set RDATE  datetime  0 4 - datetime  4 2 - datetime  6 2

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Example how to run program and write stdout and stderr to file with timestamp   cmd  c   C  Program Files  x86  program exe  -param fooo  gt  gt   c  dir space Log  date  10 4  date  4 2  date  7 2   time  0 2  time  3 2  time  6 2  txt  2 gt  amp 1    Key part is to double quote whole part behind cmd  c and inside it use double quotes as usual  Also note that date is locale dependent  this example works using US locale

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Use the cmd exe command processor to build a timestamped file name to log your scheduled task s output To build upon answers by others here  it may be that you want to create an output file that has the date and or time embedded in the name of the file   You can use the cmd exe command processor to do this for you  Note  This technique takes the string output of internal Windows environment variables and slices them up based on character position   Because of this  the exact values supplied in the examples below may not be correct for the region of Windows you use   Also  with some regional settings  some components of the date or time may introduce a space into the constructed file name when their value is less than 10   To mitigate this issue  surround your file name with quotes so that any unintended spaces in the file name won t break the command-line you re constructing   Experiment and find what works best for your situation  Be aware that PowerShell is more powerful than cmd exe   One way it is more powerful is that it can deal with different Windows regions   But this answer is about solving this issue using cmd exe  not PowerShell  so we continue  Using cmd exe You can access different components of the date and time by slicing the internal environment variables  date  and  time   as follows  again  the exact slicing values are dependent on the region configured in Windows    Year  4 digits     date  10 4  Month  2 digits    date  4 2  Day  2 digits      date  7 2  Hour  2 digits     time  0 2  Minute  2 digits    time  3 2  Second  2 digits    time  6 2   Suppose you want your log file to be named using this date time format   quot Log  yyyyMMdd   hhmmss  txt quot    You d use the following  Log  date  10 4  date  4 2  date  7 2   time  0 2  time  3 2  time  6 2  txt  To test this  run the following command line  cmd exe  c echo  quot Log  date  10 4  date  4 2  date  7 2   time  0 2  time  3 2  time  6 2  txt quot   Putting it all together  to redirect both stdout and stderr from your script to a log file named with the current date and time  use might use the following as your command line  cmd  c YourProgram cmd  gt   quot Log  date  10 4  date  4 2  date  7 2   time  0 2  time  3 2  time  6 2  txt quot  2 gt  amp 1  Note the use of quotes around the file name to handle instances a date or time component may introduce a space character  In my case  if the current date time were 10 05 2017 9 05 34 AM  the above command-line would produce the following  cmd  c YourProgram cmd  gt   quot Log 20171005  90534 txt quot  2 gt  amp 1

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You can have a debug cmd that calls yourscript cmd  yourscript cmd  gt  logall txt   you schedule debug cmd instead of yourscript cmd

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The  gt  gt  will append the log file  rather than overwriting it each time  The 2 gt  amp 1 will also send errors to your log file   cmd  c YourProgram exe  gt  gt  log txt 2 gt  amp 1

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You can write to a log file on the lines that you want to output like this    echo off echo Debugging started  gt C  logfile txt echo More stuff echo Debugging stuff  gt  gt C  logfile txt echo Hope this helps   gt  gt C  logfile txt   This way you can choose which commands to output if you don t want to trawl through everything  just get what you need to see  The  gt  will output it to the file specified  creating the file if it doesn t exist and overwriting it if it does   The  gt  gt  will append to the file specified  creating the file if it doesn t exist but appending to the contents if it does

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With stderr  where most of the errors go to    cmd  c yourscript cmd  gt  logall txt 2 gt  amp 1

User · Answer

Try this as the command string in Task Scheduler   cmd  c yourscript cmd  gt  logall txt

[batch-file] How do I capture the output of a script if it is being ran by the task scheduler?

Examples related to batch-file

Examples related to scheduled-tasks