[sixbrx]

Powershell is good, but one downside is that you have to explicitly check the exit code of each external program called and stop the script yourself for non-zero exit codes if that's what you want to do. Ie. there's no "set -e".

You can make a helper function or commandlet of course, but it obfuscates the code and is a pain to distribute around always where needed. They argue that non-zero exit codes for errors in external programs is a convention that doesn't exist consistently where Powershell is used. OK, but all the programs I use do follow that convention and so I find that very painful.

[WorldMaker]

Yeah, DOS/Windows applications have used for some long number of years non-zero return codes for a lot more complicated things than just "error" but also "type of success". The documentation on Robocopy is an interesting example.

PowerShell's default handling for native commands is treating anything written to stderr as signaling an error, which is somewhat more reliable for old DOS/Windows commands (but not necessarily reliable for some Unix commands that use stderr as a secondary logger for various reasons including because they expect stdout to pipe redirected more often than not). Though you need to set $ErrorActionPreference [0] to something other than "Continue" to notice this behavior.

However, since Powershell 7.3 there is also a setting you can temporarily change to treat non-zero returns as errors: $PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference [1]. Note that as its name suggests you need to set $ErrorActionPreference to something useful for it to work as you intend.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...