Tell if Stop-Process was successful or not in PowerShell

Question

Currently I start processes in PowerShell like this:

$proc = Start-Process notepad -Passthru
$proc | Export-Clixml -Path (Join-Path $ENV:temp 'processhandle.xml')

to later on kill it like this:

$proc = Import-Clixml -Path (Join-Path $ENV:temp 'processhandle.xml')
$proc | Stop-Process

The problem is that if the process died before I got to call $proc | Stop-Process, I will get error in the PowerShell output. I need to disable this error and just get the Boolean value indicating if Stop-Process was successfully into a PowerShell script's variable. How can I get this info in PS?

`$?` variable is true if the last executed command was successful and false if it failed. To disable error output set -ErrorAction to SilentlyContinue — Cole9350, Aug 14 '15 at 19:28
You could also check whether the process exists, before you're trying to kill it. — Peter Hahndorf, Aug 15 '15 at 07:41
@Cole9350, your solution works like charm. You could post your comment as an answer and I will mark it as one. Thank you very much! — Maxim V. Pavlov, Aug 15 '15 at 09:52

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 17 '15 at 19:30

Use the $? variable to determine the success or failure of your last executed command. Set $ErrorActionPreference variable to decide how error output is handled per script, or use -ErrorAction parameter to set it per command:

$proc = Import-Clixml -Path (Join-Path $ENV:temp 'processhandle.xml')
$proc | Stop-Process -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
if($?) {
    #Success
    Write-host $proc " Stopped Successfully"
}
else {
    #Failure
    #Use $error variable to retrieve the message
    Write-Error $error[0]
}

Tell if Stop-Process was successful or not in PowerShell

1 Answers1

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