Home / server / Questions / 164097
Accepted
John Sibly
Asked: 2010-07-27 04:38:44 +0800 CST

Is it possible to disable a scheduled task from the command line in Windows XP?

  • 772

On my Windows 7 machine I can run something like:

schtasks.exe /Change /TN "MyTaskName" /Disable

But /Disable doesn't seem to be available in Windows XP - is there any way of disabling it from the command line?

scheduled-task windows-xp command-line-interface

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The /disable switch is only a feature of Vista/7/2008R2/2012.

    You can simply rename the task .job file to "disable" it.

    schtasks /Create /SC HOURLY /TN "TEST TASK" /TR notepad
schtasks

TaskName                             Next Run Time            Status
==================================== ======================== ===============
TEST TASK                            09:45:00, 7/26/2010

move "C:\WINDOWS\Tasks\TEST TASK.job" "C:\WINDOWS\Tasks\TEST TASK.bak"
schtasks
INFO: There are no scheduled tasks present in the system.

    In order to "enable" the task rename the .bak file to .job:

    schtasks
INFO: There are no scheduled tasks present in the system.

move "C:\WINDOWS\Tasks\TEST TASK.bak" "C:\WINDOWS\Tasks\TEST TASK.job"
schtasks

TaskName                             Next Run Time            Status
==================================== ======================== ===============
TEST TASK                            09:45:00, 7/26/2010
    • 8

  2. In order to acheive the run-once behaviour, you could always just code a 'wrapper' bat script that checks for a lock file.

    Create the lock file on first run, and every there after the wrapper script will just exit if it finds the lock file:

    if exist Lock.file goto :eof
    • 2

  3. You have to run this code:

    SCHTASKS /Change /TN "\yourFolder\yourTask" /Disable
    • 1