RE: Can't Run Excel From A Cron Job Under Windows 7

["Kertz, Denis (D)** CTR **" <d dot kertz at alcatel-lucent dot com>]

>>> Try starting cron in terminal session and see if anything comes up.
>
> Stop (don't kill! Everyone, who use -KILL, must be -KILL'ed) the cron service,
> then start cron in terminal, using `runas /user:... ...'. So it would run
> under proper user, and see if anything come up, when it execute your excel
> job.

I was unable to find how to use runas from a terminal.  I can simply type runas and it does nothing and I can't find --help or /help.  I did find a suggestion to use cygstart so I tried this:

$ cygstart --action=runas '/bin/cygrunsrv --start cron'
Unable to start 'C:\cygwin64\bin\cygrunsrv --start cron': The specified file was not found.

So that didn't work.  I did try starting the cron service (cygrunsrv) from a terminal session run as administrator and I tried starting the cron service from the Windows services.msc.  Nothing has worked for running an Excel program with my run.excel script.

I created a "null" .xls file that does nothing when run by Excel.  I can run my script (run.excel  c:/Shared/Bin/null.xls) from a bash prompt and it does nothing (as expected) and terminates but when I run this same script from a cron job Excel starts but never terminates.  Running a ps command I see this:

$ ps
      PID    PPID    PGID     WINPID   TTY     UID    STIME COMMAND
     5188    1184    5188       4928  ?       1000 19:00:01 /usr/bin/sh
     6040    5820    5188       4428  ?       1000 19:00:02 /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/wscript  <-- runs vb script that starts Excel
     1808    4464    1808       5704  ?       1000 18:24:25 /usr/sbin/cron
     5184    5540    5184       6048  pty1    1000 21:13:03 /usr/bin/bash
     3368    5184    3368       5560  pty1    1000 19:00:25 /usr/bin/ps
     5820    5188    5188       5820  ?       1000 19:00:02 /usr/bin/sh
     4464       1    4464       4464  ?       1000 18:24:25 /usr/bin/cygrunsrv
     1184    1808    1808       1184  ?       1000 19:00:01 /usr/sbin/cron
     5540       1    5540       5540  ?       1000 21:13:03 /usr/bin/mintty
$

And I see the Excel.Exe *32 in the process list of Task Manager so I know Excel was started.

Note the above ps command shows the wscript command running which is the command that executes the vb script that runs Excel.  Also note that all of these processes including the wscript command show the 1000 UID which is the Upar2 login UID in the /etc/passwd file.

I also look in the services.msc window and the cron service properties shows Login As .\Upar2.  I see the same on the WinXP PC where I can run Excel successfully from a cron job.

Denis

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