Returning an error code from CMD to Powershell

Question

I'm working on a Mssql install script and I want to get the results of a silent mssql installation. In my PowerShell script I run this command:

$result = (start cmd "/c D:\SQL2008R2\SQL2008R2\setup.exe /CONFIGURATIONFILE=sqlconfig.ini && exit 0 || exit 1")

Which should return 0 on fail and 1 on pass. Unfortunately, I don't get any output back. Any ideas?

This is not how && works, and you can't choose exit 0 or exit 1 after the setup runs. You have to test ERRORLEVEL, and that's typically done in a batch file, which could then exit with the appropriate error code. — Ken White
– Ken White, Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 20:55
Well, it actually does work like that. && runs the left side and if it's false (the command failed) then it runs the right side of the &&. Operator precedence groups (Left && Middle) || Right. Now that I think about it, if || is a conditional-or and only runs until a true value, then I should have actually used & instead of ||. — Caleb Jares
– Caleb Jares, Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 21:07

Andy Arismendi · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-12 23:53:16Z

13

An alternative to Start-Process is the more syntactically terse call operator &.

& cmd.exe /c 'ping.exe doesnotexist && exit 0 || exit 1'

The exit code will be contained in the built-in variable $LASTEXITCODE so:

Write-Host $LASTEXITCODE

This will contain the exit code of the program run so you don't necessary have to run it with CMD.exe you could just do:

& ping.exe doesnotexist ; Write-Host $LASTEXITCODE

Applied to your command line program:

& cmd.exe /c 'D:\SQL2008R2\SQL2008R2\setup.exe /CONFIGURATIONFILE=sqlconfig.ini && exit 0 || exit 1'

Or just:

& D:\SQL2008R2\SQL2008R2\setup.exe /CONFIGURATIONFILE=sqlconfig.ini

In both cases $LASTEXITCODE should be 0 for success, non-zero otherwise (if the external program was written correctly).

answered Jun 12, 2012 at 23:53

Andy Arismendi

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1 Comment

Caleb Jares Over a year ago

Yeah, I saw that you could do that as well. I wanted mine to be in a new window, though. So I needed Start-Process

Caleb Jares · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-12 22:00:01Z

2

This is how you do it: start is actually an alias Start-Process, so you have to look at it's documentation, which is a lot different than cmd.exe's start. So you can do this:

(Start-Process -FilePath "cmd.exe /c ..." -Wait -Passthru).ExitCode

So easy!

edited Jun 12, 2012 at 22:00

answered Jun 12, 2012 at 20:55

Caleb Jares

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2 Comments

user189198 Over a year ago

Keep in mind that, that will simply write it to the pipeline. If you want to echo it to StdOut, you would use the Write-Host cmdlet.

Caleb Jares Over a year ago

This was a false positive. As it turns out, this only works if you remove the start cmd "/c part. It worked for me because I had been trying both in my PowerShell session. Command prompt still isn't returning anything..

Bakhshi · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-26 03:21:36Z

0

Too late maybe but does this help?

start /WAIT cmd.exe /C "YOUR-COMMAND-HERE" & if errorlevel 1 echo 'error occurred'

you can also explicitly return an error code like this:

start /WAIT cmd.exe /C "YOUR-COMMAND-HERE & exit MY-ERROR-CODE" & if errorlevel 1 echo 'error occurred'

answered Jun 26, 2014 at 3:21

Bakhshi

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