Chapter 4: Scheduling Tasks to Run Automatically

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Overview

As an administrator, you probably find yourself repeatedly performing the same or similar tasks every day. You may also find that you have to come in to work early or stay late to perform tasks during non-business hours. These tasks might be routine maintenance activities, such as deleting temporary files so that disks don’t run out of space or backing up important data. Tasks might be more involved processes, such as searching the event logs on all business servers for problems that need to be resolved. The good news is that if you can break down these tasks into a series of steps, chances are that you can also automate these tasks and Microsoft Windows provides several ways to do this, including

• Schtasks Advanced command-line utility for running commands, scripts, and programs on a scheduled basis. Tasks can be scheduled to run one time only, on a minute-by-minute basis, at a specific interval (such as hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly), at system startup, at logon, or whenever the system is idle.

• Task Scheduler Graphical utility for running commands, scripts, and programs on a scheduled basis. Task Scheduler performs the same operations as the Schtasks command-line utility, allowing you to use Task Scheduler and Schtasks together, and to manage tasks created in either utility by using one tool or the other.

Because Schtasks and Task Scheduler can be used interchangeably, this chapter discusses how both utilities can be used to automate the running of programs, command-line utilities, and scripts. In most cases, you’ll find that it is useful to know both utilities and that even when you use Task Scheduler for point-and- click convenience, you’ll still work with the command line.

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