Windows – Display or install Windows product key on command line

clusterhpclicensingwindows

We are currently in the process of setting up several Windows HPC clusters using Windows 2008 HPC R2. We would like to be able to perform Windows licensing commands across the clusters via the command line, i.e. display the current license status, install a product key, re-arm a trial key, etc.

Unfortunately, the slmgr command always opens a dialog box to display its output, rather than writing to standard output. This is extremely unpleasant, as we'd like to be able to run parallel operations on the license status using the HPC tools.

Can anyone suggest a command for managing Windows licenses that works completely on the command line?

Best Answer

Apologies for answering this myself: we encountered the answer just a minute ago.

It turns out that if you call slmgr with cscript, the output will go to the command line rather than a dialog box. So you want a command like,

cscript slmgr c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -dli

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A little known one is

getmac

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Screenshot of running getmac from a Windows commandline window.

Windows – Does Windows have a built-in ZIP command for the command line

It's not built into Windows, but it's in the Resource Kit Tools as COMPRESS,

C:\>compress /?

Syntax:

COMPRESS [-R] [-D] [-S] [ -Z | -ZX ] Source Destination
COMPRESS -R [-D] [-S] [ -Z | -ZX ] Source [Destination]

Description:
Compresses one or more files.

Parameter List:
-R Rename compressed files.

-D Update compressed files only if out of date.

-S Suppress copyright information.

-ZX LZX compression. This is default compression.

-Z MS-ZIP compression.

Source Source file specification. Wildcards may be
used.

Destination Destination file | path specification.
Destination may be a directory. If Source is
multiple files and -r is not specified,
Destination must be a directory.

Examples:

COMPRESS temp.txt compressed.txt
COMPRESS -R *.*
COMPRESS -R *.exe *.dll compressed_dir

Best Answer

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