Powershell: Sleeping mid-pipeline

Question

I need to add a (relatively) small pause between two sets of code because the second half needs to have the first half executed successfully prior to running -- but PowerShell sometimes gets a little ahead of itself and proceeds before the previous command completed entirely.

Just for context, this is the code I'm working with:

Initialize-Disk -PassThru -PartitionStyle GPT -Confirm:$false `
      | New-Partition -DriveLetter D -UseMaximumSize

Often this fails because the drive isn't completely initialized by the time PowerShell executes the New-Partition.

Typically I'd use something like:

Initialize-Disk -PassThru -PartitionStyle GPT -Confirm:$false
Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
New-Partition -DriveLetter D -UseMaximumSize

However the problem is that the output object of Initialize-Disk is lost and New-Partition doesn't get an input object.

I tried putting the Start-Sleep in the pipeline:

Initialize-Disk -PassThru -PartitionStyle GPT -Confirm:$false `
      | Start-Sleep -Seconds 2 `
      | New-Partition -DriveLetter D -UseMaximumSize

...but it throws an exception as Start-Sleep doesn't know how to make sense of the input object (which is fair enough).

Start-Sleep : The input object cannot be bound to any parameters for the command either because the command does not take pipeline 
input or the input and its properties do not match any of the parameters that take pipeline input.
At C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\test.ps1:104 char:87
+ ... nfirm:$false | Start-Sleep -Seconds 2 `
+                    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (MSFT_Disk (Obje...11E2-93F2-0...):PSObject) [Start-Sleep], ParameterBindingException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InputObjectNotBound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.StartSleepCommand

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tl;dr: How can I add a pause in my code whilst keeping the output object of the preceding cmdlet?

Answer 1

You can try using background job:

Initialize-Disk -PassThru -PartitionStyle GPT -Confirm:$false -asjob |
wait-job | receive-job | New-Partition -DriveLetter D -UseMaximumSize