Powershell Trasnscript - Output to a file and NOT display in console

Question

I am writing a PowerShell script to gather general information on our servers. I wrote the script so that it outputs to a file called output.txt via PowerShells Start-Transcript cmdlet. Output works fine. However I just want the output in the file and not displayed on the console.

I have been looking and attempting to see if Start-Transcription can suppress the console output but I have not found anything.

This is a very cut down version of the code I am using-

Start-Transcript -path "Path\To\Output\File.txt"
$servers = Get-Content -path "Path\To\Servers\List\file.txt"
foreach ($server in $servers)
{
net view
net use
net session
}
Stop-Transcript

It all outputs to the file correctly but I just would like it to NOT display the script/command results in the console. If that is possible.

the Start-Transcript cmdlet is not designed to suppress output to the screen. [grin] if you want things quiet, then assign them to a $Var. then, instead of the transcript cmdlets, simply save it to a file directly. — Lee_Dailey
– Lee_Dailey, Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 18:37
@Lee_Dailey any advice on how to do this? I'm only dabble in PowerShell and programming in general so a lot of this is foreign territory to me. — FRALEWHALE
– FRALEWHALE, Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 18:50
it looks like ErikE has posted an answer that otta work. my personal pref would be to assign the output of each exe to a $Var and then send that to a file with Add-Content, but that is a personal pref. ///// as an aside, have you tried using the built in powershell cmdlets to get the info as objects instead of raw, semi-structured text? try looking at Get-Help *net* for some ideas. — Lee_Dailey
– Lee_Dailey, Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 19:13

ErikE · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-30 19:27:49Z

1

Would this work?

$FilePath = 'Path\To\Output\File.txt'

net view | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath
net use | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath -NoClobber -Append
net session | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath -NoClobber -Append

Or bundle it:

Invoke-Command {net view ; net use ; net session} | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath -NoClobber -Append

EDIT based on comment (but written freely from memory on an iphone so maybe minor mistakes): To run this remotely against a list of servers you first enable Powershell remoting on the servers, many ways to do it and here is one to run in a local powershell session on each server (Runas Admin):

winrm quickconfig

Then, assuming they all have the same login, you can:

$Cred = Get-Credential
$Servers = ’server1.example.com’,’server2.example.com’

Invoke-Command -ComputerNames $Servers -Credential $Cred -ScriptBlock {
 Do stuff
 Do some other stuff
} | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath -NoClobber -Append

Results are returned as an array so if you want to separate the output per server you could try:

$a = Invoke-Command [...]etc but skip the |Out-File

then do some loop which in essence does this part, giving you the manual way here:

$a[0] | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath1 -NoClobber -Append #result from first computer
$a[1] | Out-File -FilePath $FilePath2 -NoClobber -Append #result from second computer
...

and an example loop:

$a | Foreach-Object {$_ | Out-File -FilePath $Path -Append -NoClobber}

And to read the servernames from a text file, one servername per line:

$Servers = Get-Content -Path ’C:\temp\example.txt’
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $Servers [...]etc

edited Jan 30, 2019 at 19:27

answered Jan 29, 2019 at 18:50

ErikE

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2 Comments

FRALEWHALE Over a year ago

I edited the code above to include some critical parts that I forgot. I ran the bundled code it piped back with the first server and then threw an error: ,"The list of servers is not available for this workgroup".

FRALEWHALE Over a year ago

Can't edit my old comment so I am just adding a new. I was a dunce and did not add the \\127.0.0.1\ to the net view command. But this works! However I think this only does it to the local machine. I was hoping I could run this against a text file of servers. How would I go about doing that?

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