Powershell Tracing and Control-M

Question

I seem to have run into a problem/bug when trying to capture tracing output when running a Powershell script from Control-M.

The output file shows the headers and footers of the start-trace and stop-trace commands, but it does not show anything else I try to capture. Specifically, if my script issues a write-host command somewhere, then that information is not captured in the output (trace) file.

Here is a super simple script that illustraes my problem:

start-transcript -path "C:\Powershell\transcript.log"
write-host "test message"
#do stuff...
stop-transcript

Here is an example of my current output when running the script through Control-M:

**********************
Windows PowerShell Transcript Start
Start time: 20140212002005
Username  : mydomain\SYSTEM 
Machine   : myserver (Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1) 
**********************
**********************
Windows PowerShell Transcript End
End time: 20140212002008
**********************

Note that my test message does not show up! This only happens when I run the script via Control-M. When I run my script manually, my "test message" does show up in the transcript output.

My first suspicion was file permissions, but those look good to me. The Control-M agent uses system level access, so it should have all the permissions it needs anyway. If it were a file permission issue, I don't believe i would even get the header/footer messages.

I'm on PS v2.0. My server is running 2008r2.

Any thoughts appreciated...

Answer 1

Write-Host writes to to the console window, which is not what's being "watched" by Control-M. Try Write-Output instead. Write-Host is usually not what you want for producing output.

See http://windowsitpro.com/blog/what-do-not-do-powershell-part-1 and http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/donjones/archive/2012/04/06/2012-scripting-games-commentary-stop-using-write-host.aspx