AutoIt is becoming increasingly popular in the system administration field as a tool for automating administrative tasks. Although this is one of its more popular uses, you can use AutoIt to automate anything in a Windows environment. This powerful scripting language can run any program and manipulate keyboard and mouse input. With its RunAs support, administrators can perform unattended installations and configuration changes using embedded administrative privileges.

This guide teaches you the foundations of the AutoIt v3 language. You will learn about variables and includes, graphical user interfaces, user-defined functions, and conditional and loop statements. You will then apply what you have learned in examples related to the system administration field. The examples in this Short Cut can be used to create anything from a game modification to a logon script that verifies Windows updates.