Managing Services Using the Sc.exe Command

You can use the Sc.exe command to start, stop, configure, and manage various aspects of services in the same way that you can on earlier versions of Windows. The Sc.exe command provides administrators with far more flexibility in configuring services than the Services snap-in or Group Policy.

The Sc.exe command was previously enhanced in Windows Vista with additional command-line switches, including the following:

• New switches for specifying required privileges for a service, including:
  • privs Sets the required privileges for a service
  • qprivs Queries for the required privileges of a service
• New switches that support per-service SIDs, including:
  • sidtype Changes a service's SID
  • qsidtype Retrieves the setting for a service's SID
• New switches to enable configuration of the FailureActionsOnNonCrashFailures setting, including:
  • failureflag Changes the setting of the FailureActionsOnNonCrashFailures flag
  • qfailureflag Retrieves the setting for the FailureActionsOnNonCrashFailures flag
  • showsid Displays the service SID string corresponding to an arbitrary name
  • stop This is an old setting that was enhanced in Windows Vista to specify the stop reason. This setting enables postmortem reliability analysis to find an administrator's reasons (by examining the event logged by SCM with the stop reason) for stopping a service.

New in Windows 7 are command options for Sc.exe that allow configuring and querying a service for supported triggers. For information about how to use these new command options, see the sidebar titled "Direct from the Source: Sc.exe Command Support for Service Triggers" later in this tutorial.

For more information about the command-line switches for Sc.exe, type sc /? at a command prompt.