How to ignore an error in Powershell and let it continue?

Question

I am trying to see if a process is running on multiple servers and then format it into a table.

get-process -ComputerName server1,server2,server3 -name explorer | Select-Object processname,machinename

Thats the easy part - When the process does not exist or if the server is unavailable, powershell outputs a big ugly error, messes up the the table and doesn't continue. Example

Get-Process : Couldn't connect to remote machine.At line:1 char:12 + get-process <<<<  -ComputerName server1,server2,server3 -name explorer | format-table processname,machinename
+ CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-Process], InvalidOperatio   nException    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.InvalidOperationException,Microsoft.Power   Shell.Commands.GetProcessCommand

How do I get around this? If the I would still like to get notified if the process isn't available or Running.

Answer 1

Add -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue to your command.

When it's not an error, but an unhandled Exception, you should add -EV Err -EA SilentlyContinue, in order to catch the exception. (EA is an alias for ErrorAction)

You can then evaluate the error in your script, by having a look at $Err[0]

Answer 2

Short answer: Add $ErrorActionPreference = 'SilentlyContinue' at the start of your code so you don't need to add -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue to every command

Long answer: Controlling Error Reporting Behavior and Intercepting Errors