Question

When you run a powershell window in the background, how do you re-connect to it? Or instead, is it’s output intended to be viewed via log file at that point?

Answer 1

Normally you would just output to a log and examine that for a scheduled task. However, if you can tolerate the console window flashing up briefly, you can pinvoke to the Win32 API to control the visiblity of the console window e.g.:

$src = @'
    [DllImport("Kernel32.dll")]
    public static extern IntPtr GetConsoleWindow();
    [DllImport("User32.dll")]
    public static extern bool ShowWindow(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 nCmdShow);
'@

Add-Type -Name ConsoleUtils -Namespace Foo -MemberDefinition $src

$hide = 0
$show = 1

$hWnd = [Foo.ConsoleUtils]::GetConsoleWindow()
[Foo.ConsoleUtils]::ShowWindow($hWnd, $hide)

Start-Sleep -Sec 5

[Foo.ConsoleUtils]::ShowWindow($hWnd, $show)

Read-Host "Press any key to exit"

Normally you wouldn’t want to show the window but perhaps you define an environment variable and then have the script inspect that environment variable for a certain value and show the window in that case e.g. $env:DebugSchTask -eq 'yes'.