why does the multiple "find" doesn't work in SC query

Question

I wrote a command line

sc query PlugPlay | FIND "SERVICE_NAME" | FIND "STATE"

to list only the service name and its status but it's not giving any output. Please correct me how to list the service name and its STATE (running or stopped) only.

Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2613826/regular-expressions-in-findstr — nobody, Jun 23 '14 at 15:48

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 23 '14 at 15:48

You can do this with Windows' built-in findstr command. If you give it multiple words to find, separated by spaces, it will print lines that match any word (i.e. findstr "a b" is equivalent to grep -E 'a|b').

sc query plugplay | findstr "SERVICE_NAME STATE"

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 23 '14 at 15:49

Running two pipes like that is not an "or" operation, it is an "and" operation. It will only output lines that include both SERVICE_NAME and STATE (which will be none, so no output is correct). If you run just the first find it gives

C:\>sc query PlugPlay | FIND "SERVICE_NAME"
SERVICE_NAME: PlugPlay

C:\>

and thus the STATE information is already removed.

The windows find command is too simple and limited to do what you want, but it can be achieved using the unix grep command. From cygwin for instance:

$ sc query PlugPlay | grep -E 'SERVICE_NAME|STATE'
SERVICE_NAME: PlugPlay
        STATE              : 4  RUNNING
$

why does the multiple "find" doesn't work in SC query

2 Answers2