Is it possible to run an .exe or .bat file on 'onclick' in HTML

No, that would be a huge security breach. Imagine if someone could run

format c:

whenever you visted their website.

Here's what I did. I wanted a HTML page setup on our network so I wouldn't have to navigate to various folders to install or upgrade our apps. So what I did was setup a .bat file on our "shared" drive that everyone has access to, in that .bat file I had this code:

start /d "\\server\Software\" setup.exe

The HTML code was:

<input type="button" value="Launch Installer" onclick="window.open('file:///S:Test/Test.bat')" />

(make sure your slashes are correct, I had them the other way and it didn't work)

I preferred to launch the EXE directly but that wasn't possible, but the .bat file allowed me around that. Wish it worked in FF or Chrome, but only IE.