Scripting: Detecting the host architecture vs the process architecture

GarrettS — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 22:06:00 GMT

I had some trouble lately with scripts running on a 64bit version of Vista, when they were run with a 32 bit parent host process.

After figuring out what was wrong, I wanted to be able to detect if I was running a 32-bit script engine under a 64-bit OS. With a bit of crafty (crufty?) coding, I came up with the following VBScript which I put at the top of my script:

sub EnsureNativeScriptEngine

On Error resume next

dim WshShell,WshProcEnv,system_architecture, process_architecture

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Set WshProcEnv = WshShell.Environment("Process")

process_architecture= WshProcEnv("PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE")

if process_architecture = "x86" then

system_architecture= WshProcEnv("PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432")

if system_architecture = "" then

system_architecture = "x86"

end if

else

system_architecture = process_architecture

end if

if NOT system_architecture = process_architecture then

WshShell.popup "This script should be run as a "& system_architecture & _

"process, but is running as a "& process_architecture &" process."

WScript.quit 1

end if

end sub

EnsureNativeScriptEngine

Which is fine and dandy, except I’d really have liked to just transparently execute the script with the right version of the script host.

Ah well, at least this tells me what’s going on. J

g	Garrett Serack \| Program Manager \| Connected Identity and Directory\| Microsoft Corporation blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/garretts

Garrett Serack: Open Source Development at Microsoft : Vista

Scripting: Detecting the host architecture vs the process architecture