Vista - native command messages/errors

How do I get the verbose messages/errors displayed by native command calls
back into a variable inside of powershell or at least to show up in the
output? At the moment the closest thing I can find is the $lastexitcode
variable which is good for determining if an error occurred but doesn't help
in ascertaining the exact error message of a native command. The $error
object contains nothing when a native command fails. I want to convert my
processes over to powershell but without the ability to display exact error
messages from native commands the benefits will not outweigh the hassles of
trying to debug the scripts because the errors are not shown!

Is there a way to “pipe� the native command call to a text file and then
read that back into powershell after the command finishes? I tried to do this
but the DOS pipe “>� didn’t work for whatever reason.

E.g.
& "$TFExecutablePath\.\tf.exe workspace /delete $Name
/s:$TeamFoundationServerUrl /noprompt > c:\test.txt"

"Joey" <Joey@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0D0A70B5-E0CC-4EE7-B7C4-01439B978F16@xxxxxx


You can use 2> to pipe error messages to a file, and the Get-Content cmdlet
to read them back again eg

xcopy nosuchfileA fileB 2>errors.txt
$anyerrors = Get-Content errors.txt
$anyerrors

--
Jon

Joey wrote:
This should help:
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/arc...rvariable.aspx


--
Microsoft MVP - Windows PowerShell
http://www.microsoft.com/mvp

PowerGadgets MVP
http://www.powergadgets.com/mvp

Blog:
http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com

Try moving "> c:\test.txt" outside of the quotes.

Marco


--
Microsoft MVP - Windows PowerShell
http://www.microsoft.com/mvp

PowerGadgets MVP
http://www.powergadgets.com/mvp

Blog:
http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com

As a note here.. I have a blog series on Error handling.

http://bsonposh.com/modules/wordpress/?p=51

$erroractionpreference/$error may not have effect on "native" commands.


Brandon Shell
---------------
Blog: http://www.bsonposh.com/
PSH Scripts Project: www.codeplex.com/psobject

M> Joey wrote:
M>M> This should help:
M> http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/arc...oraction-and-e
M> rrorvariable.aspx
M> PowerGadgets MVP
M> http://www.powergadgets.com/mvp
M> Blog:
M> http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com

"Marco Shaw [MVP]" <marco.shaw@_NO_SPAM_gmail.com> wrote in message
news:#5wKAybMIHA.4476@xxxxxxAnd combine with Jon's suggestion:

& "$TFExecutablePath\tf.exe" workspace /delete $Name
/s:$TeamFoundationServerUrl /i 2>&1 > c:\test.txt

This is something I do all the time with my build scripts (we use TFS also).
You might also find this useful

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# Helper function to deal with legacy exe exit codes
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
function CheckLastExitCode {
param ([int[]]$successCodes = @(0), [scriptblock]$script)

$Scriptname = $MyInvocation.Scriptname
$ScriptLine = $MyInvocation.ScriptLineNumber - 2
$failureMessage = (gc $Scriptname)[$ScriptLine]

if ($successCodes -notcontains $LastExitCode) {
if ($script) {
"Executing cleanup script: $script"
&$script
}
throw "EXE EXITED WITH CODE ${LastExitCode}: $failureMessage"
}
}

The one thing I like about this WRT TF.exe is that TF.exe returns a partial
success code (1) so you can specify an array of "success" codes in this
function as well as a cleanup function if it fails e.g.:

tf.exe ....
CheckLastExitCode 0,1 { tf.exe undo $path /r /i }

--
Keith

"Keith Hill [MVP]" wrote:
Thanks for all the suggestions. I ultimately went with adding the 2>&1 to
the end of all of my native commands and i'm now able to see errors/messages
from them in the normal powershell output stream.