How to test whether a service is running from the command line

Question

I would like to be able to query whether or not a service is running from a windows batch file. I know I can use:

sc query \"ServiceName\"

Answer 1

Thinking a little bit outside the box here I'm going to propose that powershell may be an answer on up-to-date XP/2003 machines and certainly on Vista/2008 and newer (instead of .bat/.cmd). Anyone who has some Perl in their background should feel at-home pretty quickly.

$serviceName = "ServiceName";
$serviceStatus = (get-service "$serviceName").Status;

if ($serviceStatus -eq "Running") {
    echo "Service is Running";
}
else {
    #Could be Stopped, Stopping, Paused, or even Starting...
    echo "Service is $serviceStatus";
}

Another way, if you have significant investment in batch is to run the PS script as a one-liner, returning an exit code.

@ECHO off
SET PS=powershell -nologo -command
%PS% "& {if((get-service SvcName).Status -eq 'Running'){exit 1}}"

ECHO.%ERRORLEVEL%

Running as a one-liner also gets around the default PS code signing policy at the expense of messiness. To put the PS commands in a .ps1 file and run like powershell myCode.ps1 you may find signing your powershell scripts is neccessary to run them in an automated way (depends on your environment). See http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SigningPowerShellScripts.aspx for details