Scripting Windows sysadmin tasks

Last Updated on July 15, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

I mentioned a couple of days ago a coworker’s philosophy about sysadmins and scripts that automate most tasks.

Here’s a site that has a lot of useful one-liners. http://www.robvanderwoude.com/ntadmincommands.php

And Rob Vander Woude’s site touches on this, but the FOR command is something I wish I’d learned and mastered in 1998, rather than whenever it was I learned it.

Sometimes you have to do something repetitive, like copy a file out to every server, or worse yet, every computer on the network.

A real-world example: My boss came to me one day and said that a client needed a font installed on every computer, and they wanted it done that day. He said he already told them that was impossible. And I said that actually it wasn’t. A job like that should take less than an hour if the network cooperates.

The trick is something like this:

for %%i in (big list of computers here) do copy font.ttf \\%%i\c$\windows\fonts

Even generating that list of computers isn’t all that difficult. It’s not obvious, by any stretch, but Mr. Vander Woude gives a couple of options for that, too. I do it with net view and a pipe. Scroll to the middle of this entry for an example.

I once had a canned script like this that copied antivirus definitions out. That way, if I noticed a server wasn’t getting updates automatically, I could run that, blast out the update so it was protected and up to date, and then I could figure out why the server wasn’t getting the updates and address that problem.

Some of my own scripts

I thought I’d share a few of my own scripts with you. Feel free to adopt them and adapt them to your own needs.

• Convert a list of hostnames to a list of IP addresses
• Ping sweep
• Disk cleanup
• Finding PST files
• Clear a print queue
• Open explorer windows
• Toggle between two hosts files
• Toggle registry settings
• Check Windows versions remotely

Also, here’s how to avoid invalid global switch errors when running WMIC. And sometimes when you’re writing a script you need more than one command per line.