Powershell Get-Service (Stop) but NOT display status "waiting for service to stop..."

Question

Basically, I don't have an issue with the action being taken. My question is about the status output of the action "waiting for..." message. Is there a way to suppress that message?

Example:

PS C:\Users\a.real.person.maybe> Get-Service *fewserviceswithmatchingprefixes* | Where-Object {$_.Name -notmatch 'somethinghere' -and $_.Name -ne 'alsosomethinghere' -and $_.Name -ne 'somethinghereprobably'} | Stop-Service
WARNING: Waiting for service 'thoseservicesabove' to stop...
WARNING: Waiting for service 'anotheroneofthoseservicesabove' to stop...

Answer 1

You can either set the value of the $WarningActionPreference variable at the callsite to Ignore or SilentlyContinue (both will suppress consumption and rendering of the warning message):

$WarningActionPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'
Get-Service *fewserviceswithmatchingprefixes* | Where-Object {$_.Name -notmatch 'somethinghere' -and $_.Name -ne 'alsosomethinghere' -and $_.Name -ne 'somethinghereprobably'} | Stop-Service

Or you can use the -WarningAction common parameter explicitly when making the call to Stop-Service (it will only affect that particular invocation of Stop-Service):

... | Stop-Service -WarningAction SilentlyContinue

Answer 2

@mathias in comments hit the nail on the head!

bunch of stuff | Stop-Service -WarningAction SilentlyContinue

Answer 3

To complement Mathias' helpful answer:

You can alternatively use a 3> redirection, namely 3>$null to silence warnings:

... | Stop-Service 3>$null

PowerShell's output streams are numbered (with streams 1 (success), and 2 (error) corresponding to the system-level stdout and stderr streams when communicating with the outside world), and 3 refers to the warning stream, which can be targeted >, the redirection operator; redirecting to $null effectively discards the targeted stream's output, if any.

This works with any of the output streams (> being implicitly the same as 1>, i.e. targeting the success output stream), and PowerShell even offers redirection *> to redirect all streams.
Targeting a file name or path rather than $null (quietly) saves the stream output to a plain-text file with the same formatting you would see in the terminal, except that stream-specific prefixes such as "WARNING: " are omitted.

Using something like 3> has one advantage over using the common -WarningAction parameter:

• Only cmdlets and advanced functions and scripts support -WarningAction, whereas 3>$null is also effective with simple functions and scripts that use Write-Warning.

  • By contrast, the $WarningPreference preference variable is equally effective for all PowerShell commands.

  • However, preference variables, notably the $ErrorActionPreference preference variable, do not apply to external programs: streams 3 and higher do not apply to external programs, and an external program's stderr output is (sensibly) not considered error output by default (though such output can be targeted as stream number 2); to silence an external program's stderr output, you must use 2>$null

  • As an aside: Additional warning-related functionality that is also only supported by cmdlets and advanced functions/scripts is the ability to collect warnings in a variable, via the common -WarningVariable parameter; the closest approximation of this functionality with a 3> redirection is to target a file to write the warnings to (which would necessitate displaying that file's content after the fact to also print the warnings).

• While technically distinct, a stream-targeted redirection such as 3> should behave the same as the equivalent -WarningAction SilentlyContinue parameter, and - with the exception of 2> / -ErrorAction - equally applies to -*Action Ignore.

  • -ErrorAction Ignore -like 2>$null / -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue - suppresses error-stream output, but - unlike the latter - additionally prevents the (non-terminating) errors that occur from getting recorded in the automatic $Error variable, which is a session-wide collection of errors that have occurred so far.
  • In rare edge cases (for reasons unknown to me), -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue can fail to record $Error, whereas 2>$null still does - see this answer for an example.