Returning Codes from PowerShell

PowerShell - the scripting language from Microsoft - often needs to be called from a command line. Often the calling program then needs to receive and inspect the exit code from the script to see if the PowerShell script completed OK.

Example

For instance, say we have the following code in a script called bad.ps1:

## bad.ps1

## Something went wrong - let everyone know 
exit 7

...and then we call this suffixed by "exit $LASTEXITCODE":

rem bad.bat

rem Run our script
cmd.exe /c "powershell.exe  -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned C:\wherever\bad.ps1;exit $LASTEXITCODE"

rem Check if we can see the error
echo %ERRORLEVEL%

And so we see the correct error level in the calling program (in our case the batch script):

C:\>rem bad.bat

C:\>rem Run our script

C:\>cmd.exe /c "powershell.exe  -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned C:\wherever\bad.ps1;exit $LASTEXITCODE"

C:\>rem Check if we can see the error

C:\>echo 7
7

Further Reading

Creating a Test Pack