There is the standard way of managing services which most people use because it’s well-known and fairly easy. This involves going into Administrative controls or going into the control panel, hunting down the Services utility and doing what you need to do.

If you want to manage the services that are running on a different computer or server on your network, you need to go to computer management, connect to the remote machine, and then manage those services.

There’s nothing at all wrong with taking this approach – in fact system administrators everywhere use these standard Windows utilities to manage the infrastructure across the enterprise. But, what if you could monitor, stop and start services by typing in a single line at the command prompt?

Controlling Services From the Command Line

You may need to stop services running in a client computer so that you can reinstall some software. Or maybe you need to restart services that are running on a server because some software isn’t working properly.

Up until now, you’ve probably managed services on client machines running on your network using the standard services utility. This is the Services tool that you launch in the Administrative Tools section of the control panel.

In Admin Tools, you can either go directly to the Services tool, or open up computer management if you want to access a different computer on your network.

To access a different computer, just click action, “Connect to Another Computer” and then type the network name of the computer.

Then you can open up the services tool.

An Easier Way To Manage Services

So anyway, that’s the long way. The shorter and faster way is to use the command “SC”.

You’re probably familiar with the NET command. The SC command is nearly identical to NET, except that it can also create a service, in addition to monitoring, stopping and starting them. Best of all, you can issue the SC command against other computers over the network (assuming you have admin rights).

Doing an SC query against a computer will give you all of the installed services and whether they are running. When you issue the command “SC \\**computer-name** query |more” – you’ll get an output as shown here.

As you can see, this gives you the state of the service, the type of service and other parameters. For the sake of our exercises here, we’re going to pay attention to just the state of the services.

If you want to list only the services that are currently not running (stopped), then you would issue the command, “SC \\**computer-name** query state= “inactive” |more”

The |more part of the command makes the output pause on each screen so that you can scroll.

As you can see, those services are all stopped. Now, instead of having to dig through all of those services, if you know the name of the service, you can just issue the command “SC \\**computer-name** query **service-name**”

That will report back with the current status of just that service and nothing else. To remotely stop a service, all you have to do is issue the stop command, “SC \\**computer-name** stop **service-name**”

The output will show a state of “STOP-PENDING”, but after a few moments, if you query that service again, you’ll see that it is no longer running. You can start it by issuing the same command, but replacing “stop” with “start”.

Creating A Script To Query, Stop Or Start Any Service

Okay, so now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to write a script that will stop any service that you want without the need to remember the exact command string. We can do this by writing a trusty Windows Script, as follows.

<script type="text/javascript" language="VBScript">// <![CDATA[
   Option Explicit On Error Resume Next Dim WshShell Dim strInput Dim strComputer Dim x Dim blnGetList Dim strStopStart set WshShell=CreateObject("WScript.Shell") x=0 strComputer = InputBox("Enter the computer or server name:") Do while x=0    'Query User for Service to check    strInput = InputBox("Enter the service name or DONE:")    If strInput = "DONE" or strInput = "done" then 	x=1    Else 	strStopStart = MsgBox("Stop Service? Yes-Stop, No-Start", VBYesNo, "Stop Request")        'Send commands 	IF strStopStart = vbYes then       	    WshShell.run "cmd.exe"             WScript.Sleep 1000             WshShell.SendKeys "sc \\" &#038; strComputer &#038; " stop " &#038; strInput &#038; " >> c:\temp\results.txt"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
            WScript.Sleep 1000
            WshShell.SendKeys "exit"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
 
         Else
 
      	    WshShell.run "cmd.exe"
            WScript.Sleep 1000
 
            WshShell.SendKeys "sc \\" &#038; strComputer &#038; " start " &#038; strInput &#038; " >> c:\temp\results.txt"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
            WScript.Sleep 1000
            WshShell.SendKeys "exit"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
	 End If 
 
  End If
 
Loop
 
WScript.Quit
// ]]></script>

When you run this script, it’ll ask you for the name of the service that you want to stop or start.

And then whether you want to stop or start the service.

Using the “>> c:\temp\results.txt” command, it outputs the stop and start results and errors to a text file that you can use to see whether the command worked.

When I ran the script above, I followed it up with a quick query of the service before and after running the script.

As you can see, the service I stopped – helpsvc – was running. I ran the Windows Script to stop it, queried it, and it was stopped.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could add a section to the script that outputted all of the currently installed services on the PC to a text file that you could review before deciding which service to stop or start. The command for that would be “sc \\” & strComputer & ” query > c:\temp\services.txt”.

As you can see, the SC command can be a pretty powerful and efficient way to manage services on any computer, and if you have some talent with Windows Scripting, you can even automate the process to make your job even easier.

Do you think the SC command could come in handy for you? What about an automated script that runs the command? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

If you’ve followed my recent scripting articles, then you know that  I really like command line programming. I use Windows Scripting, but lots of readers still use the old batch jobs, which still work well.

However, there is a really cool tool called Swiss File Knife (sfk), which extends the sort of scripting set we’ve all become accustomed to.

The tool includes the usual command file functions that you may be used to, like mkdir, copy or list, but it extends your cmd powers with other amazing features like easily manipulating files, analyzing folders, and even higher level functions not usually associated with command line commands.

Setting Up Swiss File Knife

Setting up sfk on your computer is really easy. First, download sfk and place the executable somewhere on your hard drive, and then edit the PATH in the environment variables so that the path where that file is located is included.

Reboot your computer, and then you’re ready to get started. There are loads of really cool commands that you can kick off with sfk, but I wanted to touch on the ones that I liked the most.

One of the useful commands that come in handy when you’re trying to figure out what folders or directories are hogging all of your computer hard drive space is the treesize command.

“sfk treesize [directory]” will run down through all subdirectories, showing you how many files each directory has and the total memory consumption.

At the bottom of the results, you’ll find the total statistics for the folder you launched the command against. You’ll see a total count of files, directories and memory usage.

Another useful command for when you want to run a script that doesn’t allow for directories or files with spaces, is the sfk deblank command.

The command is used to target a file, directory, or all files within a directory. To remove spaces from all file names inside a directory, just type “sfk deblank [directory name]“.

This will go through the entire directory and rename any file with a space in it, replacing spaces with the underscore character.

Getting into some of the more advanced features of sfk is the snapto command, which can take multiple text files and collect the contents into a single file. This is really useful for collecting a collection of log files all into one file.

The command for this is “sfk snapto=filename.txt”.  Filename.txt is the name of the output file where you want all of the combined text contents to output to.

One of my favorite commands in sfk is the httpserv command. By simply navigating to a particular folder and typing “sfk httpserv”, you can instantly launch a simple web server, with that directory as the root web directory.

The command uses your computers current network IP address as the web host IP, so any other computer on the network can open up that directory by opening up a web browser and typing that IP into the address. This is a really cool way to instantly share out an HTML page you may be working on, or if you want to quickly show someone the contents of a folder over the network.

While you might be tempted to use this to share out files, like pictures or movie files, it’s actually faster to launch a quick FTP server using my other favorite sfk command, ftpserv.

When you type “sfk ftpserv”, it will instantly launch an ftp service so that any user on your network can open up an FTP client and connect to that directory via FTP file transfer. Here is Filezilla connected to my laptop computer after I enabled the service on the laptop through the “sfk ftpserv” command.

These are just a few of the cool things you can do with sfk. If you load it onto a USB drive, just think of the powerful commands at your fingertips no matter what computer you are on. Plug in your USB stick and use sfk commands to launch and instant web service, or to quickly scan through a collection of documents, looking for specific words and joining together multiple files with just one or two quick command lines.

Swiss File Knife is the swiss army knife of command line programming tools, and it’ll make your life a whole lot easier. Give it a shot and let us know which commands you like best. Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Growing a blog takes years, and a whole lot of pain and struggle – I’m sure Aibek would testify to that. Then there are the major transitions, when you realize that you have to make some major changes, and it’s going to take a whole lot of work.

There are a number of major changes I’ve had to make on my own blog, but one of the most difficult was due to the fact that I had used a certain manual method to insert Google adverts into my blog articles.

Changing Posts With A Single SQL Command

The problem is that after several years of running the blog, I had nearly 1,000 posts with that Google advert manually inserted. If I ever wanted to make a change, that’s a thousand posts I’d have to edit.

I wanted to use that cool in-post template add-on that I wrote about in 2010.  This would automate the insertion of adverts moving forward, but if I used it without removing all of those existing adverts, I’d end up with two ads in the old articles.

To remove the old advert , I had to perform a little bit of SQL magic, and I’m going to share that with you today. The action takes place in phpMyAdmin, and you’ll need to select the database of your blog from the left menu.

The code that you’re going to use to strip sections of your content will be in the SQL tag. What I mean by that is the code I’m going to show you, you’ll be able to use to remove any content that exists on multiple blog posts, from 2 to 200 – or more. The only requirement is that what you want to remove has to have a common start text and an end text – like a Google advert has a common start tag and an end tag.

This is what my newer blog entries look like, with the ad manually inserted right after the “more” tag on every page, aligned on the right.

The way this code is laid out on the page looks like this:

As you can see, I have a “script type” start tag that I can use at the start of every advert, and a “script src” tag I can use at the end.

So here’s how it works. You need to tell the SQL “update” command that you want to completely wipe out that block of your page. You’ll need to understand three basic MySQL functions – replace, substr and locate.

First, use LOCATE to tell the command the locations of the start and end points. In my case, I use the strings at the start and end of the section I want to remove. The start location on the page of the beginning is:

LOCATE ('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content)

The end location is trickier. Locate gives you the start of the string, so you have to add the number of characters to the very end of the string to get the ending location.

LOCATE('<script src='http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript">', post_content) + 93

Next, you’re going to need to tell the “REPLACE” function exactly what text you want to replace. You do this by extracting the actual string out of the post content, using the SUBSTR function. You have to pass it the starting location (which you now have) and the length. The length you need to calculate by subtracting the starting position from the last position (which you also have).

Here is what that looks like, with the code above inserted into the SUBSTR function:

substr(post_content, locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content), ((locate('<script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript">', post_content) + 93) - (locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content))))

Looks crazy right? But if you look carefully, you’ll see there’s the three sections embedded – post content, start location, and length.

Now that you have the exact text that you want to remove from your posts, all you have to do is tell the REPLACE function to replace it with a space. Just copy the code above into the following command:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, string_to_replace, replacement_string);

Like this:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, substr(post_content, locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content), ((locate('<script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript">', post_content) + 93) - (locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content)))), ' ');

Running the script above, if all of the syntax is properly aligned, you should see the following successful results in phpAdmin.

Now, when I reload the posts in my web browser – voila! The ad has magically been stripped away.

Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t work on all ads, because I had some older ones that had slightly different formatting on the start and end. Like this page.

But with a little bit of tweaking, just changing the precise tags for start/finish, I was able to re-run the SQL and wipe those out as well.

This technique will work to remove any content at all that is in your WordPress post content. That’s the beauty of having the posts in a MySQL database, you can simply run SQL commands to manipulate thousands of posts all at once – saving a tremendous amount of manual work. Just make sure to back up your database before you start!

Do you have any other neat uses for this SQL command? Give it a shot on your own WordPress database and see how well it works for you. Share your experiences and feedback in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock

Some see the command line as Linux’s weak point, the ultimate symbol of a system lacking ease of use. Others know the command line as one of Linux’s best features, giving learned users quick access to features most computer users don’t even know exist. There’s a reason even Mac OS X comes with a full-featured terminal. CommandLineFu is an encyclopedia of exactly those features. A database featuring over 8,000 unique commands, this site can seem overwhelming at first – just like the command line itself. Dig in though, and you will wonder just how you used a computer without the command line.

Sorry, Windows users – the majority of these commands only work on Linux. Some work on Mac OS X as well.

Browsing

Head over to CommandLineFu to get started. You will immediately see the commands submitted most recently.

You can “grep” (read: search) the archive, if you want, or simply click “All Time Greats” to see the most popular commands. Or if you prefer, simply browse the massive tag cloud that makes up this sites right sidebar.

A Few Highlight Commands

Experienced command line users will immediately find things they are interested in, but what about everyone else? Here is a quick list of my discoveries from this site.

Quick, Temporary Web Server

Want to quickly share a file with someone? Set up your own web server in a few keystrokes with this handy command:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Just like that, your current directory will be shared. Here’s what it looks like in a web browser:

Naturally, you’re going to need to set up your router properly if you want to share with someone outside your current network. A dedicated IP or a service like DynDNS will also be needed. Still, for local file sharing, it’s hard to beat the above command: it’s quick and easy. It worked for me on Ubuntu and OS X.

Run Preview Command As Sudo

This one’s probably only useful for users of Ubuntu, or other systems utilizing sudo. It allows you to re-run the last command you executed as sudo, perfect if you forgot to add that vital preface.

See Your Unread Emails

Want a quick rundown of your unread emails? this simple command can do the trick, provided your email client of choice is Gmail.

It worked for me on Ubuntu and OS X; Linux users should make sure “curl” is installed.

See Your Mounted Devices

A mounted device is any storage drive plugged into your system and working. Need to see a full list of them? Simple.

Watch A Text Version of StarWars

Okay, this one’s not useful. It is, however, awesome. Watch a text-only version of Star Wars, complete with ASCII animated characters:

The code for this is simple:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

3 Different Feeds

Do you want to know every time a new awesome command is discovered? CommandLineFu offers three different Twitter and RSS feeds for just that purpose. Which one you use depends on how frequently you want updates; check them all out here.

Conclusion

This site is awesome. Exploring it can teach you a great deal about not only the command line but also about computers in general.

Did you learn anything cool? Share links to your favorite commands in the comments below, or just list them yourself.

Many network administrators have to telnet into network switches in order to query or set up ports, monitor the health of systems, or even reboot network devices that accept commands via telnet. Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could automate telnet jobs just like you would script regular batch jobs?

The truth is that if you are accustomed to using VB script to create your Windows scripts (or even if you aren’t), VB scripts provides a very useful feature where you can establish the Windows Shell script as an object, and then issue that “object” carefully timed commands. Essentially, this is exactly like you are sitting at a command window and typing in commands. The only difference is that your Windows script is sending the window the commands for you.

Automate Your Telnet Job

There are basically two parts to this task. You need to establish the sequence of commands that you want to go through during the typical telnet session.

Here’s what I want to do. I have 5 devices throughout the network that can be remotely rebooted via telnet by issuing 4 simple commands. I have to first telnet to it using the IP address and a specific port. Next, a menu appears, and I have to first press enter.

After I hit enter during this telnet session, the next menu expects a numeric response, followed by Enter.

Sounds a bit impossible for a scripting job, doesn’t it? Well, never underestimate the power of Visual Basic.

Now, there are other methods to do this. Just check out Abhigyan’s article on Tst10.exe to see how some people like to use the Tst scripting method to automate telnet sessions. Unfortunately, you’ll also see that it can be slightly complex for someone not accustomed to writing many scripts. Tcl is also another similar scripting language programmers have used for years for the same task.

However, I’m going to show you how a VB script file will do the same tasks in a fraction of the time and using a script that is monumentally easier to understand.

So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to break up the script into sections. Put all of these into a text file called something like Autotelnet.wsf, double click, and it’ll run.

First – establish the telnet session:

<job>

<script language="VBScript">

Option Explicit

On Error Resume Next

Dim WshShell

set WshShell=CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

WshShell.run "cmd.exe"

WScript.Sleep 1000

'Send commands to the window as needed - IP and commands need to be customized

'Step 1 - Telnet to remote IP'

WshShell.SendKeys "telnet xx.xx.xx.73 9999"

WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 1000

The section of code above will automatically open a command window and then telnet to the device on whatever specific port you need to connect. Replace “x’s” with your own IP.

The sleep command will wait long enough for the device to respond and prompt your script for the next command. Make sure this wait time is long enough for that action to take place.

Secondly, you need to send each command, one at a time, providing enough wait time between them for the telnet session to respond.

'Step 2 - Issue Commands with pauses'

WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 1000

WshShell.SendKeys "5"

WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")

WScript.Sleep 1000

In this example, I’ve issued the two commands that I noted above. First, I have the script send the “Enter” command, wait a second, then send a “5″ and press “Enter” again. This short series of actions will perform exactly as though you were sitting in front of the telnet command window doing them yourself. You’ll just need to customize this script to perform the exact responses that your telnet session requires.

Finally, don’t forget to close the command window and end the script.

'Step 3 - Exit Command Window

WshShell.SendKeys "exit"

WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")

WScript.Quit 

</script>

</job>

That’s all there is to automate telnet – three easy steps inside a very uncomplicated script. Just take the three sections above and customize them to your heart’s desire. You’ll be automating all of your support tasks to manage network switches, time clocks or other remote systems that communicate via telnet.

If you have repetitive tasks that you have to do often, make your life a lot simpler by creating automated Windows scripts that’ll do those tasks for you. You’ll be more productive, and your boss will be really impressed!

Do you have any other ideas for cool tasks you could automate using this kind of Windows script? How have you been automating your own telnet tasks? Share your thoughts and insight in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock