Although this is quite a straight forward thing to implement searching around on the web it did appear that there is some confusion around what to put where when specifying a PowerShell script from Windows Server Task Scheduler.
So I thought I’d put together this brief post. In this example I am using MS Windows Server 2008 to schedule a PowerShell to run. If we were to try and run a PowerShell from a normal command line we’d type the following:
powershell.exe –Noninteractive –Noprofile –Command “&{<fullpath to script>}”
Notice that I didn’t specify the path to the powershell executable – the reason for this being that I have the path already specified in the servers Path environment variable, ie: %SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\
If you haven’t already done this you’ll have to specify the full path to the PowerShell executable – this is a real faff (a technical term
) so I’d recommend adding it your path environment variable if you haven’t done so.
When scheduling a new task and specifying the action (ie: in this case running a PowerShell script) the core of your syntax will be in the ‘Arguments’ section of the action (see below).
Use the image below as a template and enter the directory containing your PowerShell script in the ‘Start in’ setting field.
When completed you should have something similar to the action below.
Happy PowerShelling…
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June 15th, 2009
Kiwi Si
Posted in 





My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 












What if I want to log the output to a separate text file?
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I had just finished the creation of a script to take backups for my server and it wasn’t running on the scheduler at all. I read the article and I noticed what I had left out… The full path to the script I had used ‘./’ in a bat file.
Thanks for writing the article. It helped me.
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I needed to setup a scheduled task that ran some PowerShell script in Windows Server 2008. When searching the web I noticed that a lot of people had struggled with this and so I decided to write this post to explain how I managed it. The scheduled task will ‘run whether the user is logged on or not’. You can schedule a PowerShell script using task scheduler which will run automatically on a given time.
http://blog.pointbeyond.com/2010/04/23/run-powershell-script-using-windows-server-2008-task-scheduler/
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Hi Rashid,
Thanks for the comment and the link to your script. I’ll have to download it and give it a try sometime soon. I’m sure it’ll prove useful to others.
Cheers,
Simon
[Reply]
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