stop / start windows service using findstr

Question

I need to stop and start a service when certain parameters are met in a .txt file.

When my app can't connect to a database in our test environment (regular occurence) it generates the following file type in the server folder (file date changes with each occurence)

SelfTest-20141126181000-RED.txt

Within this file is the phrase

RED: Server failed to start: Unable to open database: Unable to connect to database

Every time this is generated, along with this phrase I need to stop and start a specific service.

I have never used findstr command but I think it could be useful here. Textfile needs wildcarding obviously, and i would like a results file generating with the data and time service was stopped and started. Would the following work?

findstr "RED: Server failed to start: Unable to open database: Unable to connect to database” *RED.txt
if %errorlevel%==0 (
sc stop "my service"
sc start "my service"
echo %DATE% %TIME% database >> results.txt
)

Plan is to then have this running through scheduled tasks every 30mins or so

Answer 1

Well, obviously once you have one such file, your script will continue to find it and restart your service every 30 minutes. You'd need to delete or move the RED file.

The second problem is that the sc start command may fail while the service is still being stopped - sc stop returns as soon as the request is delivered, and does not wait. You'd need a repeated sc query "ServiceName" | find "RUNNING" check. And while the service is still running, give it some more time by running ping -n 2 127.0.0.1 > nul. Busy-waiting isn't nice, but there's no clean sleep command so ping is the common hack for that.