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Matt Rogish
Asked: 2009-05-02 12:02:11 +0800 CST

Windows Scheduled Task Reporting?

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We have about 12-14 Win200[3,8] servers online at a time (some VMs are transient). Most of these run some scheduled tasks. How can I get a list of all scheduled tasks running on each server and, more importantly, the domain user they are running as? We could certainly log into each server and ask, but am wondering if there's some powershell or other system to do this (or something in Active Directory?)

A nice to have would allow this to run on our Windows XP Desktops, too... Not a requirement but more of a FYI. Thanks!

windows windows-server-2008 windows-server-2003 scheduled-task

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Schtasks is your friend for this - AT is old and does not (SFAIK) comprehend tasks creates with schtasks. Unfortunately, the Win32_ScheduledTask WMI object is based on AT, otherwise it would be perfect for this.

    Unfortunately, neither AT nor schtasks report on the user that the job runs as. There's probably a COM object somewhere that lets you get at that; maybe you could ask on stackoverflow?

    If you want to script it you would probably do something like this:

    $servers = 'server1','server2','server3'
$allTasks = @()
$servers | %{ 
    $data = schtasks /query /S $_ /fo list
    # Data looks like this:
    # <blank line> 
    # HostName:      [SERVER]
    # TaskName:      [TASK NAME]
    # Next Run Time: 12:00:00 PM, 5/9/2009
    # Status:        [BLANK or SOME ERROR]
    foreach ($line in $data){
        $blob=""|select Host, Task, Next, Status
        [void]$foreach.MoveNext(); $l = $foreach.Current.length;
        $blob.Host = $foreach.current.substring(15, $l-15)
        [void]$foreach.MoveNext(); $l = $foreach.Current.length;
        $blob.Task = $foreach.current.substring(15, $l-15)
        [void]$foreach.MoveNext(); $l = $foreach.Current.length;
        $blob.Next = $foreach.current.substring(15, $l-15)
        [void]$foreach.MoveNext(); $l = $foreach.Current.length;
        $blob.Status = $foreach.current.substring(15, $l-15)
        $allTasks += $blob
    }
}
$allTasks|format-table

    This has become an evil code essay - it would be easier to use the /FO csv option to dump to a text file the use import-csv to get the data back into PS, but that way you lose the server name. So instead you get to show off a bit and do custom object creation and hacking around with the foreach enumerator. Calling MoveNext moves you to the next item in the list, so you skip the first empty line of output and then take each of the next 4 lines and make them into something useful.

    • 3

  2. The built-in Task Scheduler should support connecting to a remote computer (like most Windows tools) and manage the tasks of the remote computer (haven't actually tried it in XP but Microsoft seems to say it should).

    The at command which handles and presumably lists scheduled tasks can also be given a remote computer to connect to. As it's a console command, it would be easy to script it to connect to a list of computers and display all the tasks. In theory anyway ^^

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