How to test whether a service is running from the command line

sc query "ServiceName" | find "RUNNING"

if you don't mind to combine the net command with grep you can use the following script.

@echo off
net start | grep -x "Service"
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 2 goto trouble
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 goto stopped
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto started
echo unknown status
goto end
:trouble
echo trouble
goto end
:started
echo started
goto end
:stopped
echo stopped
goto end
:end

You could use wmic with the /locale option

call wmic /locale:ms_409 service where (name="wsearch") get state /value | findstr State=Running
if %ErrorLevel% EQU 0 (
    echo Running
) else (
    echo Not running
)

Thinking a little bit outside the box here I'm going to propose that powershell may be an answer on up-to-date XP/2003 machines and certainly on Vista/2008 and newer (instead of .bat/.cmd). Anyone who has some Perl in their background should feel at-home pretty quickly.

$serviceName = "ServiceName";
$serviceStatus = (get-service "$serviceName").Status;

if ($serviceStatus -eq "Running") {
    echo "Service is Running";
}
else {
    #Could be Stopped, Stopping, Paused, or even Starting...
    echo "Service is $serviceStatus";
}

Another way, if you have significant investment in batch is to run the PS script as a one-liner, returning an exit code.

@ECHO off
SET PS=powershell -nologo -command
%PS% "& {if((get-service SvcName).Status -eq 'Running'){exit 1}}"

ECHO.%ERRORLEVEL%

Running as a one-liner also gets around the default PS code signing policy at the expense of messiness. To put the PS commands in a .ps1 file and run like powershell myCode.ps1 you may find signing your powershell scripts is neccessary to run them in an automated way (depends on your environment). See http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SigningPowerShellScripts.aspx for details

Try

sc query state= all 

for a list of services and whether they are running or not.

I've found this:

  sc query "ServiceName" | findstr RUNNING  

seems to do roughly the right thing. But, I'm worried that's not generalized enough to work on non-english operating systems.

I have created one based from above but will show if the service is installed first then get whether it is running or not.

sc query "YourService" | find /i "failed" 2>&1>nul && echo.'YourService Not Installed' || (sc query "YourService"| find /i "running" 2>&1>nul && echo.Yes || echo.No)