Powershell: How can I stop errors from being displayed in a script?

powershell error-handling
Andrew J. Brehm picture Andrew J. Brehm · Dec 5, 2011 · Viewed 230.8k times · Source

When my PowerShell script tries, for example, to create a SQL Server object for a server that doesn't exist ("bla" in my case), PowerShell displays lots of PowerShell errors in red.

Since my script checks the value of $? after such calls, and displays and logs errors, I'd rather not have the several lines of PowerShell errors displayed as well.

How can I deactivate those being displayed for my script?

Answer

JNK picture JNK · Dec 5, 2011

You have a couple of options. The easiest involve using the ErrorAction settings.

-Erroraction is a universal parameter for all cmdlets. If there are special commands you want to ignore you can use -erroraction 'silentlycontinue' which will basically ignore all error messages generated by that command. You can also use the Ignore value (in PowerShell 3+):

Unlike SilentlyContinue, Ignore does not add the error message to the $Error automatic variable.

If you want to ignore all errors in a script, you can use the system variable $ErrorActionPreference and do the same thing: $ErrorActionPreference= 'silentlycontinue'

See about_CommonParameters for more info about -ErrorAction. See about_preference_variables for more info about $ErrorActionPreference.

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