Getting a remote session stack trace

Question

How do I obtain the stack trace of an exception thrown on a remote computer?

This question is almost identical, however the asker was satisfied with getting the SerializedRemoteInvocationInfo.PositionMessage. My situation has multiple scripts calling one another, so I need the full call stack to understand my problem.

The following snippet shows an empty stack trace:

$session = New-PSSession -ComputerName AComputer -UseSSL
$script = {C:\AScriptThatFails.ps1}
try{
    Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock $script
}
catch{
    Write-Output = $_.Exception.SerializedRemoteException.StackTrace #Empty!?
}

Answer 1

It looks like the error record's .ScriptStackTrace property contains the remote script execution's stack trace:

try {
  Invoke-Command -ErrorAction Stop -Session $session -ScriptBlock $script
}
catch {
  $_                    # output the error record
  $_.ScriptStackTrace   # output the script stack trace
}

Note the use of -ErrorAction Stop to escalate remote errors to script-terminating ones, so that the try / catch handler is triggered by any error, not just by script-terminating ones (that is, also by non-terminating and statement-terminating errors).

If this escalation is undesired, use the following technique:

$hadScriptTerminatingError = $false
try {
  # User -ErrorVariable to collect the errors that occur.
  Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock $script -ErrorVariable errs
} catch { $hadScriptTerminatingError = $true }
$succeeded = $? -and -not $hadScriptTerminatingError

# Analyze the collected errors, if any.
foreach ($err in $errs) {
  $err                   # output the error record
  $err.ScriptStackTrace  # output the script stack trace
}