Writing a powershell script with a function that invokes an executable, and then attempts to return a bool. Two errors occur:
Script is
function HelloWorld () {
$cmd = "./HelloWorld.exe"
& $cmd
return $true}
$ret = HelloWorld
The $ret = "Hello World
True"
UPDATED: Ok, I found a script online to create the helloworld.exe
Add-Type -outputtype consoleapplication -outputassembly helloworld.exe 'public class helloworld{public static void Main(){System.Console.WriteLine("hello world");}}'
Now We can run this:
function HelloWorld {
$cmd = ".\HelloWorld.exe"
& $cmd | Write-Host
return $true
}
$ret = HelloWorld
After run:
hello world
PS> $ret
True
PS> $ret | gm
TypeName: System.Boolean
Seems to work here at least.
HTH
The output is being captured by the assignment to $ret. Important to understand PowerShell functions return all output. when you ran & $cmd the output is returned, then you ran an explicit albeit unnecessary Return $true. Both pieces of data get returned and you see no screen output because it was consumed by the assignment.
In order to get the output of HelloWorld.exe to the console while only returning the Boolean from the function you can use either Write-Host or Out-Host. The difference being the latter traverses PowerShell's for-display formatting system, which may not be necessary in this case.
function HelloWorld ()
{
$cmd = "./HelloWorld.exe"
& $cmd | Write-Host
return $true
}
$return = HelloWorld
In this case the screen should show the output from HellowWorld.exe, but $return should only contain $true.
Note: Because of the aforementioned behavior Return isn't technically necessary. The only necessary use case for Return is to explicitly exit a function usually early.
Also note: this assumes HelloWorld.exe is a typical console application for which PowerShell will capture output into the success stream.
So in the function, there is a call to an executable which had a console.writeline statement (console.writelne("Hello world"))
calling the function works fine, but there no output that appears. Instead it got returned to the caller along with the return true/false. How can I get just the bool return without disrupting the output from the exe which we need to see on the console real time...
bool and display the output of your .exe on the PS Host? If that's so you need to direct the output of your .exe to the Information Stream.