How to tee the output streams of the current PowerShell script?

Question

I have a PowerShell script that outputs to stdout and stderr. I'd like to tee those to a couple log files at the same time.

What's the best way to do this?

A couple things I've considered:

Wrap write-error and write-output with a function that does the tee.
- I don't like this much because (a) I lose my easy ability to just put a value on a line and have it automatically output and (b) I'd have to wrap every place that I'm calling something, including native exe's, that may have output and wrap those as well.
Wrap in an outer script that does the tee.
- This is a little better but now I have the issue of needing to duplicate the param() block from the inner script in the outer script. I could move the param() block entirely but I also want to call the inner script sometimes for testing purposes (i.e. not get the tee). I suppose I could make that an optional behavior in the outer script..

I remember back when I used to write some perl there was a convenient way to redirect all stdout/err output globally, via a hook. Is something like this possible with PowerShell?

Andrew Keeton · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-23 19:54:08Z

5

Whoops. I should have spent just a couple more minutes with the Googles.

Start-Transcript does this!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347721.aspx

..though it does not capture output of exe's, only PowerShell. Here's a good workaround:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111106093956/blog.magenic.com/blogs/daniels/archive/2008/07/14/Output-Issue-with-Transcript-in-Powershell.aspx

Another update: I discovered that Start-Transcript uses the host window buffer width, which is way too narrow when running a scheduled task on the system account or whatever. Here's how to fix that. Add something like this to the top of the script:

try
{
    $host.ui.rawui.buffersize = `
        new-object system.management.automation.host.size `
            200, $host.ui.rawui.buffersize.height
}
catch {}

Change the 200 to whatever width you want for the transcript.

edited Jul 23, 2019 at 19:54

Andrew Keeton

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answered Nov 11, 2010 at 2:56

scobi

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1 Comment

Jaykul Over a year ago

There's also nivot.org/2009/08/19/… ... oh, and mark your answer as the answer :)

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