Hey, Scripting Guy! Is there any way to retrieve the system time as configured on a remote computer?

— JJ

Hey, JJ. There are at least two ways to do this, both using WMI. If you’re running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, you can use the WMI class Win32_LocalTime. As you can see, that makes it pretty easy to get the system time: you simply connect to the remote computer, query the Win32_LocalTime class, and then echo the desired time values. In other words:

strComputer = “.”

Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery(“Select * From Win32_LocalTime”)
For Each objItem in colItems
    Wscript.Echo “Month: ” & objItem.Month
    Wscript.Echo “Day: ” & objItem.Day
    Wscript.Echo “Year: ” & objItem.Year
    Wscript.Echo “Hour: ” & objItem.Hour
    Wscript.Echo “Minute: ” & objItem.Minute
    Wscript.Echo “Second: ” & objItem.Second
Next

If you want to get fancy, you can combine all these separate values into a standard date-time string, something that looks like this: 1/26/2005 8:47:04 AM. Here’s a script that can do just that:

On Error Resume Next

strComputer = “.”
Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery(“Select * from Win32_LocalTime”)
For Each objItem in colItems
    intMonth = objItem.Month
    intDay = objItem.Day
    intYear = objItem.Year
    dtmDate = intMonth & “/” & intDay & “/” & intYear
    intHour = objItem.Hour
    If intHour < 12 Then 
        strAMPM = “AM”
    Else
        intHour = intHour – 12
        strAMPM = “PM”
    End If
    intMinutes = objItem.Minute
    If intMinutes < 10 Then
        intMinutes = “0” & intMinutes
    End If
    intSeconds = objItem.Second
    If intSeconds < 10 Then
        intSeconds = “0” & intSeconds
    End If
    dtmTime = intHour & “:” & intMinutes & “:” & intSeconds & ” ” & strAMPM
    Wscript.Echo dtmDate & ” ” & dtmTime
Next

We won’t explain each line of code in the script, but for the most part all we’re doing is combining values. In fact, we only do two things even slightly tricky. First we check the hour to see if it’s less than 12; if it is, we add AM to the end of the string; if it’s not, we add a PM to the end of the string. And, yes, this means that the hour is returned in 24-hour format; thus 3:00 in the afternoon comes back as 15:00. That’s why, when checking the hour, we also subtract 12 if the hour is greater than 12. That way, 15:00 gets converted to 3:00 PM.

For both the minutes and seconds, we check to see if the returned value is less than 10. Why? Well suppose we have 8 hours, 6 minutes, and 5 seconds. If we combine these values as-is, our time will be 8:6:5. That doesn’t really look like a time, does it? Therefore, if the minutes or the seconds are less than 10, we add a leading zero. When we do that, we’re now combining 8, 06, and 05, and we get a time that looks like this: 08:06:05. Much better.

Of course, that’s all well and good as long as you’re using Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. But what about people using Windows 2000? Well, that’s OK; you can still get this same information, just not in as straightforward a fashion.

As we noted earlier, the Win32_LocalTime class doesn’t exist on Windows 2000. However, you can still get the system time by querying the Win32_OperatingSystem class and checking the value of the LocalDateTime property. The only problem with this approach is that the date and time come back in UTC (Universal Time Coordinate) format. Consequently, you get a date and time that looks like this: 20050127080605.000000+480. Yuck.

We won’t go into the details surrounding the UTC format; if you’re interested you might want to check out this section of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide. However, we will show you a script that grabs the LocalDateTime value and converts it to a slightly-more readable format:

strComputer = “.”

Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery(“Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem”)
For Each objItem in colItems
    dtmLocalTime = objItem.LocalDateTime
    dtmMonth = Mid(dtmLocalTime, 5, 2)
    dtmDay = Mid(dtmLocalTime, 7, 2)
    dtmYear = Left(dtmLocalTime, 4)
    dtmHour = Mid(dtmLocalTime, 9, 2)
    dtmMinutes = Mid(dtmLocalTime, 11, 2)
    dtmSeconds = Mid(dtmLocalTime, 13, 2)
Next
dtmNewDate = dtmMonth & “/” & dtmDay & “/” & dtmYear
dtmNewTime =  dtmHour & “:” & dtmMinutes & “:” & dtmSeconds
Wscript.Echo dtmNewDate & ” ” & dtmNewTime

We haven’t done much in the way of formatting here; for example, we don’t convert 15:00 to 3:00, nor do we indicate whether this is AM or PM. But you can do that yourself, using the same approach we took with the Win32_LocalTime.