Having issues with TC launching a batch

[Strahan]

Hi!

I'm having an annoying issue. I made a system I call HomeCenter which lets me manage smart home / home automation stuff. One of the functions is tracking laundry cycles, so when I start a load I press a button and a DB record gets entered then all the HomeCenter clients poll it every few minutes and if the time logged + duration for the cycle selected has passed, it plays an alarm. It's very loud and obnoxious so I don't miss it, lol. I wanted to be able to tell it to shut up though without using one of the HomeCenter PCs or tablets, because this morning I laid back down to snooze a bit and the alarm went off. It was a drying load, so it didn't matter if I went and handled it immediately so I just wanted HC to shut the hell up so I could sleep but as I didn't have my phone I had to get up and go to the kitchen to close out the alarm.

So I decided I need to write a batch file that will delete the record from the DB via an Alexa voice command. So I fired up my TriggerCMD GUI editor and added a new record:

Trigger: laundrydone
Command: c:\misc\laundrydone.bat
Off command: N/A
Ground: foreground
Voice: laundrydone
Voice Reply: N/A
Allow Parameters: false

I then made the batch:

@echo off
sql homecenter "delete from activeitems where action = 8192" /u service.triggercmd.homecenter /p (pwd) /h lioth.mydomain.com /l laundryreset.log

I opened the HomeCenter page and clicked Laundry, Started Wash Cycle - Clothes. I then fired up SQLyog and checked:

SELECT * FROM activeitems;

ID: 09d10a5d-ddb9-4eae-9e3e-17f6e6416cad
action: 8192
dtstarted: 2025-08-10 10:37:29
flags: 0
startedby: fe5303f8-0716-42cb-ade3-0a6023be87d9

Cool. So I said Alexa, turn on laundrydone. She said OK. I do SELECT again, and I still see my row. So I open command and go to c:\misc and run laundryreset.bat. Do another SELECT and now there are no results. So the batch file works. Next I clicked start load again to obtain data then went to the TriggerCMD GUI editor, found laundrydone and clicked the play button. SELECT'd and I still have data. I do a very similar thing for my health tracking database. I can say "Alexa, turn on diet Pepsi" and it will use loghealth.bat to add that to my daily food log (I'm diabetic so I watch what I eat carefully). So I compared the two since TC has no issue with loghealth:

C:\Misc>cacls loghealth.bat
C:\Misc\loghealth.bat NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(ID)F
                      BUILTIN\Administrators:(ID)F
                      BUILTIN\Users:(ID)R
                      MYDOMAIN\strahan:(ID)F


C:\Misc>cacls laundryreset.bat
C:\Misc\laundryreset.bat NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(ID)F
                         BUILTIN\Administrators:(ID)F
                         BUILTIN\Users:(ID)R
                         MYDOMAIN\strahan:(ID)F

Well, that looks fine. So I tried modifying the batch file:

@echo off
echo WTF is wrong with you>log.txt
sql homecenter "delete from activeitems where action = 8192" /u service.triggercmd.homecenter /p (pwd) /h lioth.mydomain.com /l laundryreset.log

Hit the play button in TC GUI, log.txt never appeared. What should I check next?

[Russ]

@Strahan, I wonder if when the TC agent runs your batch file, the sql.exe file isn't in your PATH, so it doesn't run. The agent is probably running your batch file, which you've basically already proven with your loghealth.bat experiment.

I like that you added another line to your laundryreset.bat file that writes something to a log file, but it's writing your log.txt file to the present working directory, which in the context of the TC agent is something like this:
C:\Users\russ\AppData\Local\triggercmdagent\app-1.0.47\resources\app\src

Assuming it is running your laundryreset script, you can probably fix this if you put the full path to your sql.exe file (and your log file) in the laundryreset.bat file, something like this:

@echo off
c:\full\path\sql.exe homecenter "delete from activeitems where action = 8192" /u service.triggercmd.homecenter /p (pwd) /h lioth.mydomain.com /l c:\logs\laundryreset.log
echo From laundryreset.bat >> c:\logs\laundryreset.log
dir >> c:\logs\laundryreset.log

You'll want to remove the last 2 lines, especially the dir line, but I put it there because that can show you what the working directory is.