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How to redirect the output of a PowerShell to a file during its execution

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How do I redirect PowerShell output to a file?

There are two PowerShell operators you can use to redirect output: > and >> . The > operator is equivalent to Out-File while >> is equivalent to Out-File -Append . The redirection operators have other uses like redirecting error or verbose output streams.

How do I redirect console output to a file?

To redirect the output of a command to a file, type the command, specify the > or the >> operator, and then provide the path to a file you want to the output redirected to. For example, the ls command lists the files and folders in the current directory.

What cmdlets can redirect output into a file or to a printer?

With PowerShell, you can redirect the output of any command to a text file. This is useful if you want to save the results returned by a PowerShell command or script. The PowerShell Out-File cmdlet is used to redirect output to a plain text file.


Maybe Start-Transcript would work for you. First stop it if it's already running, then start it, and stop it when done.

$ErrorActionPreference="SilentlyContinue"
Stop-Transcript | out-null
$ErrorActionPreference = "Continue"
Start-Transcript -path C:\output.txt -append
# Do some stuff
Stop-Transcript

You can also have this running while working on stuff and have it saving your command line sessions for later reference.

If you want to completely suppress the error when attempting to stop a transcript that is not transcribing, you could do this:

$ErrorActionPreference="SilentlyContinue"
Stop-Transcript | out-null
$ErrorActionPreference = "Continue" # or "Stop"

Microsoft has announced on Powershell's Connections web site (2012-02-15 at 4:40 PM) that in version 3.0 they have extended the redirection as a solution to this problem.

In PowerShell 3.0, we've extended output redirection to include the following streams: 
 Pipeline (1) 
 Error    (2) 
 Warning  (3) 
 Verbose  (4) 
 Debug    (5)
 All      (*)

We still use the same operators
 >    Redirect to a file and replace contents
 >>   Redirect to a file and append to existing content
 >&1  Merge with pipeline output

See the "about_Redirection" help article for details and examples.

help about_Redirection

Use:

Write "Stuff to write" | Out-File Outputfile.txt -Append

I take it you can modify MyScript.ps1. Then try to change it like so:

$(
    Here is your current script
) *>&1 > output.txt

I just tried this with PowerShell 3. You can use all the redirect options as in Nathan Hartley's answer.


powershell ".\MyScript.ps1" > test.log