Suppressing Powershell Errors When Calling External Executables

Question

I have a PowerShell script that is calling an external executable and I want to suppress any error that comes from it. How can this be achieved. With PowerShell cmdlets, I can use the standard -ErrorAction argument to SilentlyContinue, however this is an external executable:

someExe --argument

Ansgar Wiechers · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-11 13:01:30Z

7

The error output of external commands goes to the error stream (provided the command is writing error messages to STDERR), so you just need to redirect that stream to suppress the message:

someExe --argument 2>$null

If the command writes to STDOUT instead of STDERR (unusual behavior, but not unheard of) you may need to redirect the success output stream instead:

someExe --argument >$null

edited Mar 11, 2016 at 13:01

answered Mar 11, 2016 at 12:57

Ansgar Wiechers

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2 Comments

Matt Over a year ago

You can read more on this from about_redirection

karatedog Over a year ago

Windows' own sc.exe throws error to STDOUT

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