Question

I’m trying to execute iisvdir from an ant script to clean and create a virtual directory before I compile my .net app in Visual Studio. I am running into a couple of strange errors one one build server, but another is running the script without any problem.

    <exec dir="${SYSTEM32}" executable="cscript" failonerror="true">
        <arg line='iisvdir.vbs /create "Default Web Site" ${RS_VIRTUAL_DIR} "${env.WORKSPACE}"'/>
    </exec>

Results in:

     [exec] Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
  [exec] Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.
  [exec]
  [exec] Input Error: Can not find script file "c:\windows\system32\iisvdir.vbs".

And then

    <exec dir="${SYSTEM32}" executable="cmd" failonerror="true">
        <arg line='cscript iisvdir.vbs /create "Default Web Site" ${RS_VIRTUAL_DIR} "${env.WORKSPACE}"'/>
    </exec>

Results in

 [exec] 'reate' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
 [exec] operable program or batch file.

Can someone help me figure out what might be wrong?

Answer 1

1. Is iisvdir.vbs where you say it is?
2. To get CMD.EXE to run a command, you need to use the /C switch.

For example:

cmd.exe echo Hello

…ignores the parameters and runs another interactive command prompt as a subshell.

cmd.exe /c echo Hello

…runs the “echo Hello” statement and returns immediately. Note: You can use /K if you want cmd.exe to continue running interactively after running the statement (not usually a good idea in a build script).

Your command:

cmd.exe cscript iisvdir.vbs /create etc.

…is getting parsed as if you’d really said:

cmd.exe /c reat etc.

This is because cmd.exe has (as with most MS command line tools) freaky command line parsing.

Update: Is this a 64-bit OS? If Ant is a 32-bit task, then it’ll actually (silently) be looking in C:\Windows\SysWOW64 for cscript.exe and iisvdir.vbs. Are they there? If not, you should use C:\Windows\SysNative. In a 32-bit task, this is aliased to the real C:\Windows\System32 directory.