How to run a PowerShell script without displaying a window?

You can use the PowerShell Community Extensions and do this:

start-process PowerShell.exe -arg $pwd\foo.ps1 -WindowStyle Hidden

You can also do this with VBScript: http://blog.sapien.com/index.php/2006/12/26/more-fun-with-scheduled-powershell/

• Schedule Hidden PowerShell Tasks (Internet Archive)

• More fun with scheduled PowerShell (Internet Archive)

(Via this forum thread.)

I was having this same issue. I found out if you go to the Task in Task Scheduler that is running the powershell.exe script, you can click "Run whether user is logged on or not" and that will never show the powershell window when the task runs.

Here's an approach that that doesn't require command line args or a separate launcher. It's not completely invisible because a window does show momentarily at startup. But it then quickly vanishes. Where that's OK, this is, I think, the easiest approach if you want to launch your script by double-clicking in explorer, or via a Start menu shortcut (including, of course the Startup submenu). And I like that it's part of the code of the script itself, not something external.

Put this at the front of your script:

$t = '[DllImport("user32.dll")] public static extern bool ShowWindow(int handle, int state);'
add-type -name win -member $t -namespace native
[native.win]::ShowWindow(([System.Diagnostics.Process]::GetCurrentProcess() | Get-Process).MainWindowHandle, 0)

You can either run it like this (but this shows a window for a while):

PowerShell.exe -WindowStyle hidden { your script.. }

Or you use a helper file I created to avoid the window called PsRun.exe that does exactly that. You can download the source and exe file from Run scheduled tasks with WinForm GUI in PowerShell. I use it for scheduled tasks.

Edited: as Marco noted this -WindowStyle parameter is available only for V2 and above.