Question

I’m trying to adapt a VBscript that runs the QWINSTA command against a text file I’ve defined as an array and displays the results in a text file.

after looking at numerous examples on Stack and other sites this is my latest iteration, that displays everything except the STDOUT, which is really what I’m after, not sure if it’s an issue with how I’m calling the command piping the output or what. I’m also passing two variables as arguments to complicate matters 🙂

The Text file that stdout is piped to is empty after the FOR Loop completes
I may be going the long way about this, most of my past experience with this is in BATCH

For Each server In RemotePC

        'The Query is launched
        Dim Query As New ProcessStartInfo

        Query.WorkingDirectory = "c:\"
        Query.Arguments = server & " " & profile & " >C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt"
        Query.FileName = "QWINSTA"
        Query.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden
        Process.Start(Query)

        'Call Shell("QWINSTA /SERVER:" & server & " " & profile & " >C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt", vbHidden, Timeout:=5000)


        Dim SFOUT As New IO.StreamReader("C:\windows\temp\SFOUT.txt")

        'Results are Echoed to TextboxResults
        TextBoxResults.Text &= "__________________________________________________________" & ControlChars.CrLf
        TextBoxResults.Text &= server & ControlChars.CrLf
        TextBoxResults.Text &= SFOUT.ReadToEnd & ControlChars.CrLf
        SFOUT.Close()

    Next

Here is what the working code in VBscript looks like

For Each server In RemotePC


Dim WshShell, oExec
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set StrDir = "QWINSTA /SERVER:" & server & " " & profile


'The Query is launched
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec(StrDir)


'We wait for the end of process
Do While oExec.Status = 0
WScript.Sleep 500
Loop

'We scan and only display the command output of commands without NULL output
Do While oExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream <> True
      Results.WriteLine("__________________________________________________________")
        Results.WriteLine(server)
        Results.WriteLine oExec.StdOut.ReadLine
Loop



NEXT

Any help is appreciated

@Nilpo

this is what I get back

SESSIONNAME       USERNAME                 ID  STATE   TYPE        DEVICE 

console Matt 1 Active

I’ve built something similar to this using QWINSTA and piping the output in batch and it works flawlessly, just having issues adapting this.

---

here’s the last thing I tried I tried to simplify things by calling something as basic as notepad.exe, and even trying to define the environment variable thinking it’s not reading %PATH%, in reply to @Nilpo

Dim Query As New Process

        Query.StartInfo.FileName = "notepad.exe"
        'Query.StartInfo.Arguments = server & " " & profile & " >C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt"
        Query.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = False
        Query.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = True
        Query.StartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Normal

        Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", "%PATH%;" & "C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe")

        Query.Start()

Answer 1

You should have a space after the output redirection.

Query.Arguments = server & " " & profile & " >C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt"

Should be

Query.Arguments = server & " " & profile & " > C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt"

That being said, the only thing I can see that may not work is here.

Query.WorkingDirectory = "c:\"    
Query.Arguments = server & " " & profile & " >C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt"    
Query.FileName = "QWINSTA"    
Query.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden    
Process.Start(Query)

I’m not sure that you can use arguments in this fashion. Your output redirection is being read as a literal argument when it’s really not. In a command line environment it’s interpreted as a separate command, not an argument to the first command. It’s very similar to piping in that manner. Supplying this as an argument in your code probably won’t work as expected. You may want to go back to the Call Shell method. That will execute the command as if it were on the command line.

[Edit]

I was correct. Here is the proper way to do this using your method.

Query.WorkingDirectory = "c:\"
Query.Arguments = server & " " & profile & " >C:\Windows\Temp\SFOUT.txt"
Query.FileName = "QWINSTA"
Query.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden

'Redirect output
Query.UseShellExecute = False
Query.RedirectStandardOutput = True

Process.Start(Query)

'Read the output
Dim output As String = Process.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd
' wait for the process to terminate 
Process.WaitForExit