Error Handling

[Ioan-Popovici]

After much research and scripting I still find error handling in powershell difficult.

I want to choose a standard way of throwing a terminating error.

What would be the recommended way of doing this in a function and main script?

There's so many options to choose from:

Throw
Write-Error
ThrowTerminatingError()

[Jackson4McL]

How i have been handling errors at work ...

$ErrorDetails = @{
Message = "Something description so that u (or someone taking ur place) would know where to look"
ErrorAction = "Stop"
}

Write-Error @ErrorDetails

[Jaykul]

Three things to consider:

If the error is not always terminating

Then you should either Write-Error or $PSCmdlet.WriteError and leave it up to the user to set -ErrorAction Stop when they call your function.

To decide which to use, consider:

If you want the user to debug where the error comes from

Then you can use Write-Error -ErrorAction Stop or throw because the error will come from where it is thrown from.

Otherwise ...

If the error is due to how the command was called, or put another way: if the error is expected and can be fixed outside your command, then you probably want to hide where (in your command) the error came from, so the error appears to come "from" the call to your command.

In that case, you want to use $PSCmdlet.ThrowTerminatingError (or $PSCmdlet.WriteError if you don't want to terminate the script).