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powershellpowershell-4.0

Powershell - Monthly Scheduled Task Trigger


I'm currently automating the creation of scheduled tasks via Powershell, and I'm using the New-ScheduledTaskAction, New-ScheduledTaskTrigger, and Register-ScheduledTask commands. Now, I have a few jobs that need to run under the following conditions :

  • Run once every Friday
  • Run once on the 1st of every month
  • Run once on the 10th day of every month

While the technet documentation for the New-ScheduledTaskTrigger command specifies a Daily and Weekly time span parameter, I do not see one for Monthly, which is critical for defining the run times above.

In the few years I've been using Powershell, I can't think of an instance where I could do something via the standard UI interface, that I couldn't accomplish using one of the available commands.

Is this just flat out not available here, or am I missing something?

UPDATE #1

I just stumbled upon this SuperUser question, which does look promising, but references PSV3 instead of PSV4 - going to give it a shot and report back.


Solution

  • As I said in the original post, the SuperUser question above looked promising, but ultimately did not work with PSV4, and the example given in the post was basically a copy\paste job with almost no context.

    I realized I could leverage Schtasks.exe from my Powershell script to handle the monthly aggregations, and it's fairly easy to set up, albeit somewhat tedious :

    # set the trigger depending on time, span, and day
    $runSpan = $task.SpanToRun;
    
    if ($runSpan.Equals("Daily"))
    {            
        $trigger = New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -Daily -At $task.TimeToRun
        Register-ScheduledTask -Action $action -Trigger $trigger -TaskName $task.TaskName -User $Username -Password $Password -Description $task.Description       
    }
    
    if ($runSpan.Equals("Weekly"))
    {            
        $trigger = New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -Weekly -At $task.TimeToRun -DaysOfWeek $task.DayToRun
        Register-ScheduledTask -Action $action -Trigger $trigger -TaskName $task.TaskName -User $Username -Password $Password -Description $task.Description
    }        
    
    #  script out SchTasks magic to create the monthly tasks
    if ($runSpan.Equals("Monthly"))
    {
        $taskParams = @("/Create",
                    "/TN", $task.TaskName, 
                    "/SC", "monthly", 
                    "/D", $task.DayToRun, 
                    "/ST", $task.TimeToRun, 
                    "/TR", $filePath, 
                    "/F", #force
                    "/RU", $Username,
                    "/RP", $Password);
    
        # supply the command arguments and execute  
        #schtasks.exe $taskParams
         schtasks.exe @taskParams
    }
    

    I'm using an in-script class to keep track of all the task properties ($task.TimeToRun, $task.DayToRun, etc.), iterating over a list of those, applying the Powershell implementation for daily and weekly tasks, then switching to SchTasks.exe for the monthly spans.

    One thing I want to note, is that at first glance, I thought setting the user context under which the task runs could be achieved with the U and P arguments, but that is not the case. That specifies the creds that Schtasks.exe runs under - in order to set the user context for the task, you must use RU and RP.

    In addition to the link above, these two were also very helpful :

    http://coding.pstodulka.com/2015/08/02/programmatically-scheduling-powershell-scripts-in-task-scheduler/

    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb736357(v=vs.85).aspx