Question

I came across this one liner that appears to work:

stop-service -inputobject $(get-service -ComputerName remotePC -Name Spooler)

Can anyone explain why, because I thought stop-service didn’t work unless you either used remoting or it occurred on the local host.

Answer 1

The output of Get-Service is a System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController .NET class that can operate on remote computers. How it accomplishes that, I don’t know – probably DCOM or WMI. Once you’ve gotten one of these from Get-Service, it can be passed into Stop-Service which most likely just calls the Stop() method on this object. That stops the service on the remote machine. In fact, you could probably do this as well:

(get-service -ComputerName remotePC -Name Spooler).Stop()