How to redirect the output of a PowerShell to a file during its execution

Question

I have a PowerShell script for which I would like to redirect the output to a file. The problem is that I cannot change the way this script is called. So I cannot do:

 .\MyScript.ps1 > output.txt

How do I redirect the output of a PowerShell script during its execution?

Answer 1

Maybe Start-Transcript would work for you. First stop it if it's already running, then start it, and stop it when done.

$ErrorActionPreference="SilentlyContinue"
Stop-Transcript | out-null
$ErrorActionPreference = "Continue"
Start-Transcript -path C:\output.txt -append
# Do some stuff
Stop-Transcript

You can also have this running while working on stuff and have it saving your command line sessions for later reference.

If you want to completely suppress the error when attempting to stop a transcript that is not transcribing, you could do this:

$ErrorActionPreference="SilentlyContinue"
Stop-Transcript | out-null
$ErrorActionPreference = "Continue" # or "Stop"