Power utility for starting processes

Question

I was looking for a way to start elevated (i.e. administrator permissions) and/or invisible processes via batch in Windows. It turns out that this is kind of impossible with batch only, so I googled some vbs stuff and hacked it all together into a neat command line power utility.

The interface is as follows:

exec [/action: elevate, open, read, print] [/display: hide, show] exe [arguments]

/action defaults to open. /display defaults to show. exe is the path to an executeable, could be a script, image, whatever as well. arguments are applied to the exe.

Example: This starts a background node.js deamon with admin rights.

exec /action:elevate /display:hide node myDeamon.js

Everything works just fine, but I'm pretty sure that it's not perfect yet, as I basically have no idea about VBScript. I'd like to hear your opinions or ideas!

Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")

intOffset = 0

' get action
strAction = "open"
If (WScript.Arguments.Named.Exists("action")) Then
  intOffset = intOffset + 1
  Select Case WScript.Arguments.Named.Item("action")
        Case "elevate" strAction = "runas"
        Case "open" strAction = "open"
        Case "read" strAction = "read"
        Case "print" strAction = "print"
        Case Else strAction = "open"
    End Select
End If

' get display mode
intMode = 1
If (WScript.Arguments.Named.Exists("display")) Then
    intOffset = intOffset + 1
    Select Case WScript.Arguments.Named.Item("display")
        Case "0" intMode = 0
        Case "false" intMode = 0
        Case "hide" intMode = 0
        Case "hidden" intMode = 0
        Case Else intMode = 1
    End Select
End If

' get application to execute
strApplication = WScript.Arguments(intOffset)

' get arguments
strArguments = ""
For i = intOffset+1 To WScript.Arguments.Count-1
    strArguments = strArguments & WScript.Arguments(i)
Next

' execute application
If (WScript.Arguments.Count >= 1) Then
    objShell.ShellExecute strApplication, strArguments, "", strAction, intMode
Else
    WScript.Quit
End If

Gist

Answer 1

The number one improvement you can make is to include Option Explicit as the first line of your script and explicitly declare your variables using Dim. This will save you a lot of heartache in the future (e.g., if you make a typo in a variable name, it becomes a runtime error, instead of just silently creating a new variable).