Question

What is the stackoverflow approved (and hence correct) method to force a VBS to run using cscript instead of wscript – irrespective of what the user tries?

A quick Google search shows plenty of examples, but some of them simply don’t work and those which do often don’t handle the fact that it may have been run with arguments so I’m keen to know what the best way is.

Here is one example which doesn’t handle arguments:

sExecutable = LCase(Mid(Wscript.FullName, InstrRev(Wscript.FullName,"\")+1))
If sExecutable <> "cscript.exe" Then
  Set oShell = CreateObject("wscript.shell")
  oShell.Run "cscript.exe """ & Wscript.ScriptFullName & """"
  Wscript.Quit
End If

I appreciate that this could probably be easily modified to handle arguments, but realise that this may not be the best way to approach the problem.

Background: I’m writing a script which can run by double clicking or (most likely) from either a DOS batch file or as a scheduled task. It can contain one or more optional command line arguments.

Answer 1

My Lord, what unadulterated rubbish. It makes me cry to see such cruddy coding (no offense to anybody, lol). Seriously, though, here’s my 2 pence:

Sub forceCScriptExecution
    Dim Arg, Str
    If Not LCase( Right( WScript.FullName, 12 ) ) = "\cscript.exe" Then
        For Each Arg In WScript.Arguments
            If InStr( Arg, " " ) Then Arg = """" & Arg & """"
            Str = Str & " " & Arg
        Next
        CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" ).Run _
            "cscript //nologo """ & _
            WScript.ScriptFullName & _
            """ " & Str
        WScript.Quit
    End If
End Sub
forceCScriptExecution

It handles arguments, AND checks for spaces in said arguments — so that in the case of a filename passed to the original script instance that contained spaces, it wouldn’t get “tokenized” when passed to cscript.exe.

Only thing it doesn’t do is test for StdIn (e.g., in the case where someone piped something to the script via the command line, but forgot to use “cscript script.vbs”) — but if it was executed by WScript.exe, WScript.StdIn’s methods all return Invalid Handle errors, so there’s no way to test that anyway.

Feel free to let me know if there’s a way to “break” this; I’m willing to improve it if necessary.