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I'm trying to learn about task scheduling in Windows 10, so I set myself the task of trying to schedule a script that writes a blank file called test.txt to the user's home directory.

I did this by creating a task that executes Out-File -FilePath $HOME\test.txt:

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However, when I try to execute this task manually I see some errors:

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I've also confirmed that the test.txt file wasn't created. The error description looks like this:

Task Scheduler failed to launch action "Out-File" in instance "{32b4ec9b-49e8-441a-852d-8332f0a118d5}" of task "\TestTask". Additional Data: Error Value: 2147942402.

According to another SF question This issue is caused by a "File Not Found" error. I thought maybe it couldn't find the Out-File command so I tried changing the command to echo "test" >> $HOME\test.txt but this didn't seem to have any effect.

What am I doing wrong here?

quant
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1 Answers1

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I really should have read the answer to the question I linked better: What causes scheduled task error 2147942402?

This answers my question:

The reason is that MOVE is not a program, but a native command in cmd.

It should be:

Program: "cmd.exe" Arguments: "/c move C:\Windows\Temp*.foo E:\Foo_blah_blah_blah_blah\Foo2"

In my case what I should have done was execute the command powershell.exe with the arguments -Command "Out-File -FilePath $HOME\test.txt", which works great.

quant
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