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Jeffery Hicks

Jeff Hicks is a long-time Microsoft MVP specializing in PowerShell and automation. He creates PowerShell content for Pluralsight and blogs regularly at https://jdhitsolutions.com/blog. Jeff's latest project is a premium content newsletter at jeffhicks.substack.com Follow him on Twitter as @jeffhicks.

Latest posts by Jeffery Hicks (see all)

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If you are new to Windows PowerShell, you may be afraid it is too difficult to learn. Or that you have write complicated scripts in order to use it. That couldn’t be further from the truth. PowerShell is designed as an interactive management engine that just happens to allow scripting. The truth is that you can use PowerShell from a text based console and manage your Windows environment with a few simple commands.

To prove this we’re going to look at managing services with PowerShell from a command prompt. The emphasis is on using PowerShell interactively, not trying to script. I’m going to assume you already have PowerShell running on Windows 7 or later and you have admin rights. If you want to follow along, please try to do so in a non-production or virtualized environment. I’ll cover service management using PowerShell v2 and v3.

Get service status ^

Let’s begin by simply getting the status of all the services on the local computer. To accomplish this we’ll use a command called Get-Service. A PowerShell command like this is referred to as a cmdlet.

PS C:\> get-service

PowerShell is generally not case-sensitive. You can see the results in the screenshot below.

Manage Services with PowerShell - get-service

The output looks text but each line is actually a service object. This object-orientation in PowerShell is what trips up many beginners. All we see here is the default display. But each service object has other properties as well. You can discover them by piping the objects to another command, Get-Member.

PS C:\> get-service | get-member

You can see the results in the next screenshot.

Manage Services with PowerShell - get-member

The Typename at the top of the screen tells us what type of object this is, a System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController. When you see a name like this that starts with System, you will know that it is a .NET object. This isn’t too important right now but I wanted you to understand how to discover the object type. I’ve also circled the object properties. These are attributes that describe this type of object. Even though many of these aren’t used in the default display, if you know them you can use them.

For example, let’s say we are only interested in the Windows Update Service. We can ask Get-Service to display just that service and then select a few properties.

PS C:\> get-service wuauserv | select Displayname,Status,Can*

DisplayName         : Windows Update
Status              : Stopped
CanPauseAndContinue : False
CanShutdown         : False
CanStop             : False

How did I know I could type a service name? I looked at help for Get-Service.

PS C:\> help get-service

The screenshot displays the short help. I’m running this in a PowerShell v2 session on Windows 8 so you might see slight variations on older systems.

Manage Services with PowerShell - help get-service

You can get complete help by typing:

PS C:\> get-service wi*

Status   Name               DisplayName
------   ----               -----------
Stopped  WiaRpc             Still Image Acquisition Events
Running  WinDefend          Windows Defender Service
Running  WinHttpAutoProx... WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Se...
Running  Winmgmt            Windows Management Instrumentation
Running  WinRM              Windows Remote Management (WS-Manag...

Or, if you are more comfortable with display names, use the –Displayname parameter.

PS C:\> get-service -DisplayName "windows a*"

Status   Name               DisplayName
------   ----               -----------
Stopped  AllUserInstallA... Windows All-User Install Agent
Running  AudioEndpointBu... Windows Audio Endpoint Builder
Running  Audiosrv           Windows Audio

I had to use the parameter name so that PowerShell would treat the values as a display name and not an actual service name. A command like this would fail:

PS C:\> get-service "windows a*"

Because the –Name parameter is positional, meaning you don’t have to type it.

Service status of remote computers ^

So far we’ve been looking at service information on the local computer. Naturally we want to manage services on remote computers. If you look at help for Get-Service you’ll see a –Computername parameter. Connecting to remote computers like this does not use PowerShell’s remoting feature nor does PowerShell remoting have to be enabled anywhere. If you can manage services using command line tools like SC.EXE or the Service Manager management console, you can use PowerShell. Let’s try it out:

PS C:\> get-service spooler -ComputerName novo8

Status   Name               DisplayName
------   ----               -----------
Running  spooler            Print Spooler

Any command I’ve shown you so far you can use to query a remote computer. Even multiple computers, assuming your credential has sufficient administrative privileges on the remote computer. If you have PowerShell v3, it is very easy to check a single service on multiple computers.

PS C:\> get-service wuauserv -ComputerName chi-dc01,chi-dc02,chi-dc03

Status   Name               DisplayName
------   ----               -----------
Running  wuauserv           Windows Update
Stopped  wuauserv           Windows Update
Running  wuauserv           Windows Update

Although you need to format the output slightly to know which service goes with which computer.

PS C:\> get-service wuauserv -ComputerName chi-dc01,chi-dc02,chi-dc03 
| format-table Name,Status,Machinename -autosize

Name       Status     MachineName
----       ------     -----------
wuauserv   Running    chi-dc03
wuauserv   Stopped    chi-dc02
wuauserv   Running    chi-dc01

That’s a one line command that queried the service on 3 different computers and displayed the results in a nicely formatted table and you didn’t write a single script!

To do the same thing in PowerShell v2 takes a slightly more awkward approach, but still no scripting.

PS C:\> 'chi-dc01','chi-dc02','chi-dc03'| foreach {get-service 
wuauserv -computername $_} | Format-Table Name,Status,Machinename -AutoSize

Name       Status   MachineName
----       ------   -----------
wuauserv   Running   chi-dc01
wuauserv   Stopped   chi-dc02
wuauserv   Running   chi-dc03

Next time we’ll look at another way to accomplish this and other filtering techniques as well as explore more of this service object.