Display or install Windows product key on command line

Question

We are currently in the process of setting up several Windows HPC clusters using Windows 2008 HPC R2. We would like to be able to perform Windows licensing commands across the clusters via the command line, i.e. display the current license status, install a product key, re-arm a trial key, etc.

Unfortunately, the slmgr command always opens a dialog box to display its output, rather than writing to standard output. This is extremely unpleasant, as we'd like to be able to run parallel operations on the license status using the HPC tools.

Can anyone suggest a command for managing Windows licenses that works completely on the command line?

Answer 1

Apologies for answering this myself: we encountered the answer just a minute ago.

It turns out that if you call slmgr with cscript, the output will go to the command line rather than a dialog box. So you want a command like,

cscript slmgr c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -dli