My script only works from within ISE

PowerShell Help
1

in my script I use Invoke-Expression to run a third part command:

Invoke-Expression $command -OutVariable out
$out > C:\temp.txt

The command takes a long time and I need to post process the output; so I save the output in $out. I then find I have to pipe it to a file before using Get-Content file -raw to read the content for post processing.
The code works when I executed the script from ISE or turn it into a Module and again run it from ISE. But if I run the same module from “Windows Powershell” or “Powershell Console” the $out contains nothing; even though I can clearly see the output from the command is printed out to the screen.
I would appreciate your help with this.
many thanks

2

Hi Sina,

Can you write it this way:

$out = Invoke-Expression $command -OutVariable
$out > c:\temp.txt

I’m guessing this will work if you have defined your variables.

Take care

3

I tried your suggestion but it fails to compile!

4

$(Invoke-Expression $command -OutVariable out)

hope this should take care of it.

5

The problem with 

$(Invoke-Expression $command -OutVariable out)
is it suppresses the console output until the command has finished executing; this command takes a long time to execute and I need to provide feedback during the execution of the command - that is why I chose to use the -OutVariable option. So unfortunately, I can’t use this solution. I wonder if the issue has something to do with the length of data I need to store in $out. When I run the command in ISE the content of $out is below: is there a problem with this?

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6

I’ll leave it to smarter brains to explain why it works this way, but anyone can replicate it easily.

$mycommand = "ping 8.8.8.8"
Invoke-expression $mycommand -outvariable out

From the ISE you get $out filled with everything that you see passed as standard output, from a console $out is simply null.

I’m sure there is a good reason for this, which we don’t really need to know to resolve your current problem.
The functionality you really desire is covered by Tee-Object, which allows us to both capture the std out to a file AND pass it down the pipeline where it winds up getting sent out to the host.

$mycommand = "ping 8.8.8.8"
Invoke-expression $mycommand | Tee-Object -filepath c:\ToutTest.txt