We had an issue with a third party program that every now and again would suddenly fail. It was running as a service, now we wanted to be alerted to this so I thought I could just include a previously written batch file (slightly modified for the new purpose) in the service recovery “Run a program” section and have it alert us using email.
However I soon discovered that running a batch file from the “Run a Program” option in the service recovery tab does not work.
See here…. (This behaviour is by design…. 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247929
Anyway so I thought, no worries I will use the work around forcedos…. However there is a character limit on the command, which pretty much rules this out for my purpose.
FORCEDOS: Command line too long
The command line cannot be longer than 125 characters.
So I struggled to see how I was going to get round this….
Then I thought about “scheduled tasks”… and this is how I solved the problem. The batch file is setup to run as a scheduled task with no schedule.
Then in the Service Recovery tab for the service, the program is set to
“schtasks”
and the command line parameters set to
“/RUN /TN "<taskname>"”
This now works a treat… A pain but I think a nice work around, as most of the other batch files I have are scheduled in the scheduled task manager the finished work around actually fits in quite nicely.
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