You've proved your point. I do not know why you can edit
at-tasks on some Win2000 machines and not on some others -
I suspect it may be related either to a Service Pack version or
to an automatic update.
Instead of using at.exe, consider using schtasks.exe. At.exe
is an obsolete WinNT command - schtasks.exe offers far
better functionality and its jobs are fully modifiable under the
Task Scheduler GUI. If you cannot convince PDS to use
schtasks.exe instead of at.exe then you can probably resolve
the problem by using a "Trojan Horse" method:
- Rename at.exe to at.ex
- Create a batch file in the system32 folder called "at.bat".
- Use it generate jobs for schtasks.exe by picking up and
massaging the various parameters sent by PDS.
===================
Your email reply:
Attached are the Properties dialog from a Win2K machine and my new
WinXP machine. On the Win2K machine, all the controls are enabled, on the
WinXP machine, they are all greyed out (disabled).
I created both AT jobs by entering the command "AT 10:00 dir" in a
MSDOS window.
The reason that they are not created as ordinary scheduled tasks is
because we don't manually create them, they are programmatically created
from a software package (PDS - Intergraph's Plant Design System).
There are certain tasks that PDS allows us administrators to schedule for
recurring operation. PDS creates an AT job to process a set of
instructions. It's not simple to go into PDS all the time and recreate them
just to change a time or suspend their execution. I can change the
run time from Scheduled Tasks in just a few seconds.
Yes, the 200+ tasks are all different in many ways, different times,
days, projects, etc. It all rather complex but the automation of it
makes my life infinitely easier. It takes a spreadsheet just to keep
track of what runs where and when. Losing this functionality will be a
real pain. In fact, if it turns out that we can't find a workaround for
WinXP, I'll probably not replace those workstations and servers and
just leave them running Win2K. Of course, eventually our corporate IT
people will force us to change.
=================
I can only partially agree with you on the statement that you could not
modify them under Win2K. Give me an email address and I'll be happy to
send you screen caps from a Win2K machine where we can change AT jobs all
day long. That being said, I did notice that I can't do it from my home
PC (Win2K), but since I keep it regularly updated, I suspect one of the MS
security patches probably resulted in it being neutered like it is for
WinXP.
Deleting and recreating is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I've got 4
Win2K PCs that do all kinds of night time grunt work using about 200 AT
jobs. Modifying them has never been a problem over the last 3 or 4 years
that the PCs have had Win2K on them. We're starting to migrate to WinXP
and this is a feature that we would sorely miss.
Like a lot of other things, MS changes or takes away functionality when
going from Win2K to WinXP, but there always seems to be a way around it,
either with a reg hack, or EXE/DLL replacement. Here's a great example that
I discovered last week -- From Win2K you could browse Active Directory from
Network Places. That was removed from WinXP. Solution: Copy dsfolder.dll
from an Win2K machine to the XP machine, register the DLL then restart
Explorer and now you can browse AD again. That fix is courtesy a very
helpful MVP BTW.
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