Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

10.3. SQLCMD

SQLCMD is a utility that allows you to run scripts from a command prompt in a Windows command box. This can be very nice for executing conversion or maintenance scripts, as well as a quick-and-dirty way to capture a text file.

SQLCMD replaces the older OSQL. OSQL is still included with SQL Server for backward compatibility only. An even older command-line utility — ISQL — is no longer supported.

The syntax for running SQLCMD from the command line includes a large number of different switches, and looks like this:

sqlcmd
[
{ { -U <login id> [ -P <password> ] } | -E }
]
[-S <server name> [ \<instance name> ] ] [ -H <workstation name> ] [ -d <db name> ]
[ -l <time out> ] [ -t <time out> ] [ -h <headers> ]
[ -s <col separator> ] [ -w <col width> ] [ -a <packet size> ]
[ -e ] [ -I ]
[ -c <cmd end> ] [ -L [ c ] ] [ -q "<query>" ] [ -Q "<query>" ]
[ -m <error level> ] [ -V ] [ -W ] [ -u ] [ -r [ 0 | 1 ] ]
[ -i <input file> ] [ -o <output file> ]
[ -f <codepage> | i:<codepage> [ <, o: <codepage> ]
[ -k [ 1 | 2 ] ]
[ -y <display width> ] [-Y <display width> ]
[ -p [ 1 ] ] [ -R ] [ -b ] [ -v ] [ -A ] [ -X [ 1 ] ] [ -x ]
[ -? ]
]

The single biggest thing to keep in mind with these flags is that many of them (but, oddly enough, not all of them) are case sensitive. For example, both -Q and -q will execute queries, but the first will exit SQLCMD when the query is complete, and the second won't.

So, let's try a quick query direct from the command line. Again, remember that this ...