How to timeout PowerShell function call

Question

I wrote a little powershell function that executes Get-EventLog against remote servers. On some servers this seems to just hang and never times out. Can I timeout a powershell function call? I see how to do this against a different process, but i want to do this for a power shell function.

thanks

#######################
function Get-Alert4
{
    param($computer)
    $ret = Get-EventLog application -after (get-date).addHours(-2) -computer $computer | select-string -inputobject{$_.message} -pattern "Some Error String" | select-object List
    return $ret   
} #

Keith Hill · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-14 16:57:54Z

25

You can implement timeouts by using a background job like so:

function Get-Alert4($computer, $timeout = 30)
{
  $time = (Get-Date).AddHours(-2)
  $job = Start-Job { param($c) Get-EventLog Application -CN $c -After $time | 
                     Select-String "Some err string" -inputobject{$_.message} |
                     Select-Object List } -ArgumentList $computer

  Wait-Job $job -Timeout $timeout
  Stop-Job $job 
  Receive-Job $job
  Remove-Job $job
}

edited Jan 14, 2011 at 16:57

answered Jan 10, 2011 at 20:27

Keith Hill

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3 Comments

x0n Over a year ago

Does he need a Stop-Job after the Wait-Job? If the timeout expires the job continues to run...

Keith Hill Over a year ago

Sheesh, picky, picky. I suppose you want a remove-job in there to clean up nicely too. :-)

Keith Hill Over a year ago

Try the updated code. You can pass parameters into the Start-Job scriptblock using the ArgumentList parameter.

Yuck · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-21 02:10:08Z

4

FYI - your argumentlist is only good for one parameter. If you want to pass more than one argument to the job, you have to pass them as an array:

  $job = Start-Job { param($c, $t) Get-EventLog Application -CN $c -After $t | 
                     Select-String "Some err string" -inputobject{$_.message} |
                     Select-Object List } -ArgumentList @($computer, $time)

edited Dec 21, 2011 at 2:10

Yuck

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answered Dec 21, 2011 at 1:44

Jimmy JoeBob Alooba

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Comments

John Doe · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-22 22:54:07Z

0

This is a one liner (due to semi-colons) that will display a count down while pausing similar (but not the same) as the timeout cmd command

$NumOfSecs = 15; $n = $NumOfSecs; write-host "Starting in " -NoNewLine; do {if($n -lt $NumOfSecs) {write-host ", " -NoNewLine}; write-host $n -NoNewLine; $n = $n - 1; Start-Sleep 1} while ($n -gt 0)

answered Feb 22, 2016 at 22:54

John Doe

1

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