When creating a service with sc exe how to pass in context parameters

Question

When creating Windows service using   sc create ServiceName binPath   the path    how can arguments be passed to the Installer class s Context Parameters collection    My reading of the sc exe documentation is that such arguments could only be passed on the end of binPath  but I have not found an example or been able to successfully do this

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Be sure to have quotes at beginning and end of your binPath value

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I couldn t handle the issue with your proposals  at the end with the x86 folder it only worked in power shell  windows server 2012  using environment variables    sc exe create svnserve binpath     env programfiles x86   subversion bin svnserve exe --service -r C  svnrepositories     displayname   Subversion Server  depend  Tcpip start  auto

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sc create  lt servicename gt  binpath    lt pathtobinaryexecutable gt    option1   option2   optionN    The trick is to leave a space after the   in your create statement  and also to use     for anything containing special characters or spaces   It is advisable to specify a Display Name for the service as well as setting the start setting to auto so that it starts automatically  You can do this by specifying DisplayName  yourdisplayname and start  auto in your create statement   Here is an example   C  Documents and Settings Administrator gt  sc create asperacentral  binPath   C  Program Files Aspera Enterprise Server bin Debug asperacentral exe   DisplayName   Aspera Central   start  auto   If this worked you should see    SC  CreateService SUCCESS   UPDATE 1  http   support microsoft com kb 251192

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Parameters for created services have some peculiar formating issues  in particular if the command includes spaces or quotes   If you want to enter command line parameters for the service  you have to enclose the whole command line in quotes   And always leave a space after binPath  and before the first quote  as mrswadge pointed out   So  to create a service for the command PATH COMMAND EXE --param1 xyz you would use the following binPath parameter   binPath   PATH COMMAND EXE --param1 xyz                                                                                      space    quote                     quote   If the path to the executable contains spaces  you have to enclose the path in quotes    So for a command that has both parameters and a path with spaces  you need nested quotes  You have to escape the inner quotes with backslashes     The same holds if the parameters themselves contain quotes  you will need to escape those too    Despite using backslashes as escape characters  you do not have to escape the regular backslashes contained in the path  This is contrary to how you normally use backslashes as escape characters   So for a command like  PATH WITH SPACES  COMMAND EXE  --param-with-quotes  a b c  --param2   binPath     PATH WITH SPACES  COMMAND EXE   --param-with-quotes   a b c   --param2                                                                                                                                                                            opening     escaped      regular     escaped                    escaped       closing    quote     quote       backslash    closing                    quotes          quote      for     for            in         quote                      for              for    whole     path          path       for path                  parameter        whole  command                                                                       command   Here is a concrete example from the SVNserve documentation  which shows all special cases   sc create svnserve     binpath     C  Program Files CollabNet Subversion Server svnserve exe   --service -r   C  my repositories         displayname   Subversion Server  depend  Tcpip start  auto     linebreaks are added for readability  do not include them   This would add a new service with the command line  C  Program Files CollabNet Subversion Server svnserve exe  --service -r  C  my repositories     So in summary   space after each sc parameter  binpath    displayname   and depend   each sc parameter that contains spaces must be enclosed in quotes all additional quotes inside the binpath are escaped with backslashes     all backslashes inside the binpath are not escaped

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I found a way to use sc   sc config  binPath     c  path with spaces in it service executable exe      In other words  use   to escape any   s you want to survive the transit into the registry

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This command works   sc create startSvn binPath     C  Subversion bin svnserve exe   --service -r   C  SVN Repository    displayname   MyServer  depend  tcpip start  auto

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A service creation example of using backslashes with many double quotes    C  Windows system32 gt sc exe create teagent binpath     C  Program Files Tripwire TE Agent bin wrapper exe   -s   C  Program Files Tripwire TE Agent bin agent conf    DisplayName   Tripwire Enterprise Agent    SC  CreateService SUCCESS

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If you tried all of the above and still can t pass args to your service  if your service was written in C C    here s what could be the problem  when you start your service through  sc start arg1 arg2      SC calls your service s ServiceMain function directly with those args  But when Windows start your service  at boot time  for example   it s your service s main function   tmain  that s called  with params from the registry s  binPath

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It also important taking in account how you access the Arguments  in the code of the application   In  my c  application I used the ServiceBase class    class MyService   ServiceBase        protected override void OnStart string   args                      I registered my service using  sc create myService binpath   MeyService exe arg1 arg2   But I couldn t access the arguments through the args variable when I run it as a service   The MSDN documentation suggests not using the Main method to retrieve the binPath or ImagePath arguments  Instead it suggests placing your logic in the OnStart method and then using  C   Environment GetCommandLineArgs      To access the first arguments arg1 I need to do like this   class MyService   ServiceBase         protected override void OnStart string   args                         log Info  arg1      Environment GetCommandLineArgs   1                   this would print         arg1    arg1

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I use to just create it without parameters  and then edit the registry HKLM System CurrentControlSet Services  YourService

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it is not working in the Powershell and should use CMD in my case

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sc create  YOURSERVICENAME  binpath     C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft SQL Server MSSQL11 MSSQL Binn sqlservr exe   -sOPTIONALSWITCH  start  auto    See here  Modifying the  quot Path to executable quot  of a windows service

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I had issues getting this to work on Windows 7  It seemed to ignore the first argument I passed in so I used binPath   C  path to service exe -bogusarg -realarg1 -realarg2  and it worked

[windows-services] When creating a service with sc.exe how to pass in context parameters?

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