-ErrorAction

Q: How deeply does Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition: Write and organize scripts and tools cover -ErrorAction?

Defines five practical response choices and recommends command-level control, while warning against indiscriminate suppression.

As explained in Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition: Write and organize scripts and tools

ErrorAction is a PowerShell common parameter that controls how a command or function responds to errors.

-ErrorAction controls how an individual PowerShell command responds when a nonterminating error occurs. Prefer command-level control over changing the global default. section 15.1

Choose the response that matches the automation goal:

Continue reports the error and keeps going; SilentlyContinue hides it and keeps going. section 15.1
Inquire asks whether to continue or stop; Stop converts the error into a terminating exception that code can catch. section 15.1
Ignore suppresses the error similarly to SilentlyContinue, but applies to -ErrorAction rather than $ErrorActionPreference. section 15.1

Try several responses

Get-Service -Name BITS, Nobody, WinRM -EA Stop makes the missing Nobody service catchable. Use -EA SilentlyContinue only when the failure is genuinely irrelevant. section 15.2

How Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition: Write and organize scripts and tools covers it

Cover of Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition: Write and organize scripts and tools

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Also explained in

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Practical Automation with PowerShell: Effective scripting from the console to the cloudErrorAction is a PowerShell common parameter that specifies how a command responds to non-terminating errors.
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Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches: Fourth Edition, Covers Windows, Linux, and macOS-ea is a PowerShell parameter alias for -ErrorAction.

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This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition: Write and organize scripts and tools. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.