How to test whether a service is running from the

command line
Asked 15 years, 9 months ago Modified 1 year, 2 months ago Viewed 326k times

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:
70
sc query "ServiceName"

but, this dumps out some text. What I really want is for it to set the errorlevel environment
variable so that I can take action on that.

Do you know a simple way I can do this?

UPDATE
Thanks for the answers so far. I'm worried the solutions that parse the text may not work on non
English operating systems. Does anybody know a way around this, or am I going to have to bite
the bullet and write a console program to get this right.

windows batch-file

Share Follow edited Dec 9, 2008 at 16:00 asked Dec 9, 2008 at 15:37
Scott Langham
60k 42 133 209

2 I just tested on a China locale Chinese Language Windows 7 laptop, the "sc query ..." command output are
still English. – wangf Aug 31, 2015 at 7:15

To get service state that will be easy to parse by script no matter what OS language is used I have used
WMIC Service WHERE "Name = 'SericeName'" GET Started /format:list . It produces
State=Running - easy to parse by regexp and always in English. – Michał Maciej Gałuszka Feb 19, 2018
at 8:22

16 Answers Sorted by: Highest score (default)

sc query "ServiceName" | find "RUNNING"

98
Share Follow answered Dec 9, 2008 at 15:46
 Igal Serban
10.7k 3 36 40

@ShaiAlon, it was powershell that it did not work. It worked on the usual command prompt (cmd.exe).
– Chris Voon Aug 4, 2016 at 9:00

1 It does not work on powershell because sc is an alias to Set-Content. – Chris Voon Aug 4, 2016 at 9:01

6 sc.exe query "ServiceName" | findstr RUNNING will work within Powershell. – Chris Voon Aug 4,
2016 at 9:07

is there a way to use regex search while looking for a particular service name? Sometimes I maynot
remember exactly what the name is but I would know parts of the name.. – alpha_989 Mar 11, 2018 at
18:53

2 If the task is to start a service in case it is not running, then testing for the STOPPED status is much safer,
for the service may also be in one of the transitory states STARTING and STOPPING , when it is best left
alone. – Anton Shepelev Aug 31, 2018 at 16:11

Let's go back to the old school of batch programing on windows

19 net start | find "Service Name"

This will work everywhere...

Share Follow edited Nov 10, 2013 at 4:39 answered Mar 23, 2011 at 14:22
RealHowTo Shahin
35.3k 11 72 87 191 1 2

errorlevel is 1 both when the service exists or not. So I can't use "find". (Win 7 Pro 64 bit) – Mogens Beltoft
Oct 8, 2014 at 6:32

@RealHowTo, I am running "MobaSSH", and if I open the "Services" app from Control panel, I can check
that "MobaSSH" is working. Further, the command you mentioned, net start | find "MobaSSH" also
prints out "MobaSSH", indiciating that this command works. However, if I use the sc query "MobaSSH" |
find "RUNNING" command, it shows an error saying "EnumQueryServicesStatus: Open Service Failed
1060". Any idea why these 2 commands are showing different results? – alpha_989 Mar 11, 2018 at 16:57

When I use default Windows services such as "Fax", both commands give similar results. Also sc query
does work.. but its not working for "MobaSSH". is there something special about a service initiated by an
external program? – alpha_989 Mar 11, 2018 at 16:58

Isn't net start the command to start a service? The question is to check if the service is running, not start it
– trees_are_great Jun 6, 2019 at 10:11
 1 @trees_are_great using net start alone will list all "started" services. – Nilpo Jun 12, 2021 at 4:25

if you don't mind to combine the net command with grep you can use the following script.

8 @echo off
net start | grep -x "Service"
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 2 goto trouble
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 goto stopped
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto started
echo unknown status
goto end
:trouble
echo trouble
goto end
:started
echo started
goto end
:stopped
echo stopped
goto end
:end

Share Follow answered Dec 9, 2008 at 15:48

joerg

2 I don't seem to have grep on my system. Did you download it from somewhere, if so, where?
– Scott Langham Dec 9, 2008 at 16:04

3 I've used something like this, but with a 'find' instead of a 'grep' because I don't want to have to rely on
installing anything else. – Scott Langham Dec 9, 2008 at 18:50

@ScottLangham Does find have regex searching capability? – alpha_989 Mar 11, 2018 at 16:51

2 @alpha_989 No. If you're on windows, start command prompt and type "find /?" to see the help for it.
– Scott Langham Mar 12, 2018 at 16:46

Grep is not a default windows tool – Mike Q Jul 11, 2023 at 16:31

You could use wmic with the /locale option

7 call wmic /locale:ms_409 service where (name="wsearch") get state /value | findstr
State=Running
if %ErrorLevel% EQU 0 (
echo Running
) else (
echo Not running
)
 Share Follow answered Dec 28, 2008 at 19:05
NicJ
4,120 1 26 18

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).
7 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

Share Follow answered Jul 20, 2009 at 20:48

JGurtz

@ECHO OFF
REM testing at cmd : sc query "MSSQLSERVER" | findstr RUNNING
REM "MSSQLSERVER" is the name of Service for sample
4 sc query "MSSQLSERVER" %1 | findstr RUNNING
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 2 goto trouble
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 goto stopped
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto started
echo unknown status
 goto end
:trouble
echo Oh noooo.. trouble mas bro
goto end
:started
echo "SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)" is started
goto end
:stopped
echo "SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)" is stopped
echo Starting service
net start "MSSQLSERVER"
goto end
:erro
echo Error please check your command.. mas bro
goto end

:end

Share Follow answered Dec 23, 2016 at 2:42

Muhammad Imron
49 1 3

Add some explanation with answer for how this answer help OP in fixing current issue – ρяσѕρєя K Dec 23,
2016 at 3:08

Try

3 sc query state= all

for a list of services and whether they are running or not.

Share Follow answered Dec 9, 2008 at 15:47

Galwegian
42k 16 113 158

I would suggest WMIC Service WHERE "Name = 'SericeName'" GET Started

or WMIC Service WHERE "Name = 'ServiceName'" GET ProcessId (ProcessId will be zero if service
3
isn't started)

You can set the error level based on whether the former returns "TRUE" or the latter returns
nonzero

Share Follow answered Dec 14, 2012 at 20:27

Mark Sowul
10.5k 1 48 51
 This is actually the only way to get service state that will always return value in English no matter what is
the OS language. – Michał Maciej Gałuszka Feb 19, 2018 at 8:12

sc query "servicename" | findstr STATE

3 for example:

sc query "wuauserv" | findstr STATE

To report what the Windows update service is doing, running/paused etc.

This is also for Windows 10. Thank me later.

Share Follow edited Dec 1, 2016 at 6:32 answered Dec 1, 2016 at 5:08
General Failure Quack
2,597 4 24 52 39 1

I've found this:

2 sc query "ServiceName" | findstr RUNNING

seems to do roughly the right thing. But, I'm worried that's not generalized enough to work on
non-english operating systems.

Share Follow edited Nov 10, 2013 at 4:40 answered Dec 9, 2008 at 15:48
RealHowTo Scott Langham
35.3k 11 72 87 60k 42 133 209

If you really need to do i18n, you should write an app which queries and sets the errorlevel. – hometoast
Dec 9, 2008 at 15:49

how to access the answer of the command sc query "ServiceName" | findstr RUNNING so with
conditional statements i can do some processing – Prabhat Mishra Jun 13, 2018 at 7:02

SERVICO.BAT
@echo off
echo Servico: %1
2 if "%1"=="" goto erro
sc query %1 | findstr RUNNING
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 2 goto trouble
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 goto stopped
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto started
echo unknown status
 goto end
:trouble
echo trouble
goto end
:started
echo started
goto end
:stopped
echo stopped
goto end
:erro
echo sintaxe: servico NOMESERVICO
goto end

:end

Share Follow edited Dec 5, 2016 at 19:33 answered Dec 5, 2016 at 18:53
thor Luis Ramos
22.3k 31 101 186 21 1

Just to add on to the list if you are using Powershell.

1 sc.exe query "ServiceName" | findstr RUNNING

The command below does not work because sc is an alias to Set-Content within Powershell.

sc query "ServiceName" | findstr RUNNING

find also does not work on Powershell for some reason unknown to me.

sc.exe query "ServiceName" | find RUNNING

Share Follow answered Aug 4, 2016 at 9:07

Chris Voon
1,999 2 18 11

I noticed no one mentioned the use of regular expressions when using find / findstr -based
Answers. That can be problematic for similarly named services.
1
Lets say you have two services, CDPUserSvc and CDPUserSvc_54530

If you use most of the find / findstr -based Answers here so far, you'll get false-positives for
CDPUserSvc queries when only CDPUserSvc_54530 is running.

The /r and /c switches for findstr can help us handle that use-case, as well as the special
character that indicates the end of the line, $
 This query will only verify the running of the CDPUserSvc service and ignore CDPUserSvc_54530

sc query|findstr /r /c:"CDPUserSvc$"

Share Follow answered Feb 13, 2018 at 5:45

kayleeFrye_onDeck
6,918 5 72 87

A suggested approach can be found in an answer to a related question: target very specific things
which are locale-independent. In this case, for obtaining service status from sc.exe , the integer
1 which identifies the state was found to be independent of active language and, therefore, robust.

Short example (additional details in the linked answer):

for /F "skip=3 tokens=3" %%i in ('""%windir%\system32\sc.exe" query "W32Time"

2^>nul"') do (
if "%%i"=="4" (
echo 'W32Time' service is running
goto :SkipRemainingIterations
)
)
:SkipRemainingIterations

Share Follow edited Jun 16, 2023 at 11:05 answered Jun 15, 2023 at 23:03
Helder Magalhães
620 8 15

Use Cygwin Bash with:

0 sc query "SomeService" |grep -qo RUNNING && echo "SomeService is running." || echo
"SomeService is not running!"

(Make sure you have sc.exe in your PATH.)

Share Follow answered Dec 18, 2017 at 8:02

not2qubit
16.3k 9 108 151
 I have created one based from above but will show if the service is installed first then get whether
it is running or not.
-1
sc query "YourService" | find /i "failed" 2>&1>nul && echo.'YourService Not Installed'
|| (sc query "YourService"| find /i "running" 2>&1>nul && echo.Yes || echo.No)

Share Follow answered Nov 1, 2021 at 15:52

MSBUTech
1

Your answer is a bit hard to read and understand. Please clarify what it does, and ideally convert the code
into multiple lines so it's easier to grasp. – CherryDT Nov 2, 2021 at 10:29