Search your Windows services, preview every change, and see what drifted since yesterday

• No search. The only navigation is jumping to the first letter of a display name.
• No filtering. There is no way to ask show me what is set to start automatically and is not running.
• One row at a time. Restarting twelve services is twelve right-clicks and twelve waits.
• "Stopping..." forever, with no way out except Task Manager and guessing the process.
• No history. Nobody knows who set that start type to Disabled, or when.
• Hidden data. The process, the triggers, the privileges, the security descriptor, who signed the binary - all of it needs sc.exe from memory, or the registry.
• No command line parity. sc.exe has a syntax from the nineties, and Get-Service does not show the account a service runs as, let alone its description.

$ bws snapshot diff before.json --live --exit-code
Changed (2):
  Spooler  Print Spooler
    startType: Manual -> Automatic
    status: Stopped -> Running  (running state, not configuration)
  wlidsvc  Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant
    status: Stopped -> Running  (running state, not configuration)

Added 0, removed 0, changed 2. Fields differing: 1 in configuration, 2 in running state.

• Configuration and running state are reported apart. Two snapshots taken a day apart differ in what happens to be running and almost none of it is drift - the start type that changed is the line to read.
• What could not be compared is listed, not hidden. A field one snapshot never read comes out as not compared, so a diff that says nothing changed means nothing changed in what both sides could see.
• --exit-code ends with 5 when anything differs, so a scheduled task can take a snapshot at deployment and page somebody the first night the machine drifts.
• Two machines, two files. Take a snapshot on staging and one on production, and diff them anywhere.

$ bws stop Winmgmt --dry-run --dependents
Plan: stop Winmgmt  (2 steps)
  1. stop  vmms      (would break otherwise)
  2. stop  Winmgmt   (asked for)

Warnings:
  - Stopping Winmgmt also stops one other entry: vmms
  - Winmgmt starts automatically, so it will be back after the next restart.

• Run it without --dry-run and those are the steps, in that order, with the same reasons beside them. There is no second code path for the real thing.
• What comes down with it is in the plan. The services that would break are steps of their own, and a plan that would take down something the machine needs says so in its warnings.
• A refusal comes before the button. A driver, a service the manager will not accept a stop for, a process the system protects - refused when the plan is built, with the reason. The window greys the button and says why beside it.
• Force stop is two steps, and the second is conditional. bws kill asks the service to stop and ends its process only if that does not work, naming every other service living in it.