Question

I’m self-taught with PowerShell and I’ve written a few scripts now, some of which are pretty powerful. Despite this, I worry that I might not be using PowerShell in its intended way. Here are my two main concerns:

1. From what I’ve read, PowerShell scripts should be written in such a way that they can be piped into and also so that they can pipe their output into something else. But the way I wrote my scripts is to be completely stand-alone and output everything to the user via Write-Host.

2. Another thing I’ve read is that when errors come up (for example, you try to read a file but don’t have permission), you should use Write-Error rather than Write-Host. I don’t do this, though. I just capture the plain English error message and output it with Write-Host so it’s more user-friendly for people who don’t know anything about PowerShell or coding other than how to run scripts.

Are either of these things heavily frowned upon in the PowerShell community? If I showed one of my powerful, well-commented, easy-to-read scripts to an advanced PowerShell coder, would he scoff at it and call it garbage?

Some of my scripts could be useful to others, but I hesitate to show the code to anybody for fear that my style isn’t correct. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

I don’t think that it is expected of a script to use write-output rather than write-host so that the output can be piped to other scripts etc. Cmdlets and maybe functions can be expected to do that, but not scripts. If you have to display something to the user about the actions that the script is doing, you might as well use Write-Host. Note that using Write-Output might be good, if you want to log the output of the script to a logfile AND display on the screen to the user. Doing that when you are using Write-Host cannot be done easily / efficiently.

Write-Error add some additional info that IMO is not necessary. I rarely use Write-Error. I use Write-Host -fore red message to indicate errors in my scripts. That keeps it nice and simple.

But of course, we can’t make statements like always use Write-Output or always use Write-Host etc. It is going to depend on the situation and how you are going to be using the scripts.