2010 Scripting Games: Advanced Event 9–Logging Out Users Forcibly Based on a Program's Launch

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Note: We are no longer accepting entries for this event. See the due dates page for a list of all event due dates.

About This Event

Event Scenario

Your users do not seem to know how to log out of their computers. This is a problem because each evening, a particular application runs as a scheduled task to back itself up to a network share. This occurs before the network backup job takes place. The storage manager has assigned you to write a script that will forcibly log out users from their workstations when a particular program launches. For the purposes of this example, use calc.exe.

Design Points

·         When you manually launch calc.exe on the workstation, it should log you out.

·         The actual name of the program that launches should be configurable from the command line when your script is run (the script should be able to monitor for the name of any executable).

·         Via a dialog box or other graphical device, your script should prompt the user that the workstation will log them out within 60 seconds.

·         Design points for creating a force mode and a “nice mode.” The nice mode should check to see if any Word documents or Excel spreadsheets are open. If they are, your script should not log the user out at that time. The script should check back every five minutes to see if the documents or spreadsheets are still open.

2010 Scripting Games Links

• 2010 Scripting Games home page 

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• 2010 Scripting Games Forum

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Ed Wilson and Craig Liebendorfer, Scripting Guys

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