Could it be that psexec is waiting for a user entry? In this case hudson will hang.

Does Hudson runs with your user credentials? if not lunch a command Prompt with the credentials Hudson is running with and see what happens if you call psexec. If hudson runs on the local system account, you can t start a command prompt with it. Than try to run Hudson with your credentials and see what happens.

BTW, did you check Hudsons log files (just in case that there might be something)?

I had the same problem where PSEXEC simply hung.

The solution i found (after trawling for AGES) was to add the parameter -accepteula to the PSEXEC called. Hudson stopped hanging after that.

Very frustrating.

maybe it is too late, but I thought I will post it for others who have the same problem.

Psexec has problem running from any CI server, doesn t matter what CI server you have, is it Hudson, Teamcity, ...). Psexec hangs when run from the build server. It doesn t hang for all commands, but with some commands , psexec will hang. The problem resides with how psexec will read the output of the remote running command. The ultimate solution is to use other tools than psexec. You can check this blog of this solution. But if you need a simpler solution, and you don t care about the output of the command, I came up with a simple solution that suppress the output of the psexec. You can write a small c# program that will run the psexec command, suppressing its output.

I blogged about that here

I thought I would respond to this since I was having the same hanging problem with TeamCity and psExec. Since I believe it is actually an issue with Java executing psexec, it should apply in the case of Hudson as well.

While I ran into the accepteula issue was early on, you only need to agree once and it sets a registry setting. As user327759 indicates the -accepteula switch in the script would cover your basis the first time and for ever after.

If this doesn t fix your problem, which it didn t in my case, you need to add the "-i" command switch. ex: psexec -i ServerName "C:folderfile.bat"

For context regarding this solution, I have included my backstory:

I was able to execute this PsExec command just fine via a MsBuild task, via a .Net wrapper and via straight command prompt usage, but TeamCity would just hang on the execution. It seems that Java is expecting some response on standard in, when it invokes the psexec exe. On the remote server I would see the psexecsvc process fire up and register in the services console appropriately, but then it would stop. After reading many posts such as this one, and struggling for far longer than I would care to admit, I eventually tried -i option, despite not needing this in any other execution scenario outside of TeamCity. The psexec documentation indicates that -i will "Run the program so that it interacts with the desktop of the specified session on the remote system. If no session is specified the process runs in the console session." It is still unclear to me why this makes all the difference for TeamCity.