I am trying to get the job details without outputting the data to the screen. However, regardless of what option I try, the job logs always get sent to the console. Any ideas on how to save the logs in a variable or file without outputting that data to console?
Receive-Job -Id $id -Keep -ErrorAction Continue > C:\Temp\Transcript-$VM.txt
$info = Receive-Job -Id $id -Keep -ErrorAction Continue
You state that your job uses Write-Host output and that you're running Windows PowerShell v5.1.
In order to also capture Write-Host output - which in v5+ is sent to the information stream (stream number 6) - use redirection 6>&1:
# Capture both success output and information-stream output
# (Write-Host) output in $info.
$info = Receive-Job -Id $id -Keep -ErrorAction Continue 6>&1
Unfortunately, due to a known bug, you'll still get console output as well (bug is still present in PowerShell Core 7.0.0-preview.5).
Catch-all redirection *>&1 normally routes all streams through the success output stream.
Unfortunately, due to the bug linked to above, the following streams cannot be captured or redirected at all when using background jobs or remoting:
4)5)The only workaround is to capture the streams inside the job and save them to a file from there, and then access the files from the caller later.
Of course, this requires that you have control over how the jobs are created.
A simplified example:
# Redirect all output streams *inside* the job to a file...
Start-Job {
& {
# The job's commands go here.
# Note that for any *verbose* output to be captured,
# verbose output must explicitly turned on, such as with
# the -Verbose common parameter here.
# You can also set $VerbosePreference = 'Continue', which
# cmdlets (including advanced functions/scripts) will honor.
'success'; write-verbose -Verbose 'verbose'; write-host 'host'
} *> $HOME/out.txt
} | Receive-Job -Wait -AutoRemove
# ... then read the resulting file.
Get-Content $HOME/out.txt
Note that I've used a full path as the redirection target, because, unfortunately, in v6- versions of PowerShell script blocks executed in background jobs do not inherit the caller's current location. This will change in PowerShell Core v7.0.
Try placing it in a pipeline, and see if that works:
Receive-Job -Id $id -Keep -ErrorAction Continue | Set-Content 'C:\Temp\Transcript-$VM.txt'
> does involve a pipeline, behind the scenes; it is like implicit use of | Out-File, so what you're suggesting fundamentally couldn't be expected to make a difference.
Write-HostorOut-Hoststatement in the script block. You should remove that if so. You could also set the$InformationPreferencevariable to'Ignore'in the scriptblock if you are on PowerShell v5 or later, but it may have unintended consequences. The-InformationAction 'Ignore'onWrite-Hostdoes the same thing with a specific command and doesn't impact the environment settings.