Question

I have a script which loops through a list of users (samaccountname):

# Read usersfile to variable
$users = get-content ("users.txt")

# Get current time
$now = $(get-date -uformat "%H:%M %d/%m/%Y")

# Loop through list of users
foreach($user in $users) {

    # Disable user
    Disable-QADUser $user

    # Set informative description
    Set-QADuser $user -Description "Disabled $now"

    # Delete all groupmemberships except "domain users"
    Get-QADGroup -Containsmember $user | where-object { $_.name -ne 'domain users'} | Remove-QADGroupmember

    # Move to "disabled users" group
    move-QADObject $user -NewParentContainer 'contosoc.com/Disabled users'

    # Hide from addresslist
    Set-Mailbox -identity $user -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

    # Moving mailbox to disabled users database
    Move-Mailbox -Identity $user -TargetDatabase "myserver\mydb" -BadItemLimit 50 -Confirm:$False
}

I would like to:

• Suppress output from the different cmdlets and only show “$user is OK!” if all is ok and log success to a logfile.txt
• Display “Error!” and the command that failed if not ok. And output the complete error msgs to a separate logfile.

I’ve been thinking about doing a if(!cmdlettorun) { write-host "Error!" } But I’m thinking that there must be a better way.

How should I do error handling in a proper fashion so I minimize the displayed output but still let me see it if desirable?

Answer 1

For suppressing cmlet output you can pipe to out-null or precede the command with:

[void](.. your cmdlets..)

a good way for your goal is using a tray-catch-finally code like in this minimized code:

$a = $ErrorActionPreference 
$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"

foreach($user in $users) {

try 
{
... yours code ...
$JobStatus = "OK"
}
catch [exception]
{
   $("Error catched: " + $_.Exception.GetType().FullName) | out-file c:\file.log
   $("Error catched: " + $_.Exception.Message) | out-file c:\file.log -append

   $JobStatus = "not OK"
   continue; 
}
finally
{
   write-host "$user is $JobStatus!"
}
  $ErrorActionPreference = $a
}

For some hint to use try-catch-finally read here