PowerShell try catch finally

Question

I recently wrote a PowerShell script that works great - however  I d like to now upgrade the script and add some error checking   handling - but I ve been stumped at the first hurdle it seems  Why won t the following code work   try     Remove-Item  C  somenonexistentfolder file txt  -ErrorAction Stop    catch  System Management Automation ItemNotFoundException       item not found     catch      any other undefined errors     error 0     finally      Finished      The error is caught in the second catch block - you can see the output from  error 0   Obviously I would like to catch it in the first block  What am I missing

User · Accepted Answer

-ErrorAction Stop is changing things for you   Try adding this and see what you get   Catch  System Management Automation ActionPreferenceStopException     caught a StopExecution Exception    error 0

User · Answer

That is very odd   I went through ItemNotFoundException s base classes and tested the following multiple catches to see what would catch it   try     remove-item C  nonexistent file txt -erroraction stop   catch  System Management Automation ItemNotFoundException      write-host  ItemNotFound    catch  System Management Automation SessionStateException      write-host  SessionState    catch  System Management Automation RuntimeException      write-host  RuntimeException    catch  System SystemException      write-host  SystemException    catch  System Exception      write-host  Exception    catch     write-host  well  darn      As it turns out  the output was  RuntimeException   I also tried it with a different exception CommandNotFoundException   try     do-nonexistent-command   catch  System Management Automation CommandNotFoundException      write-host  CommandNotFoundException    catch     write-host  well  darn      That output  CommandNotFoundException  correctly   I vaguely remember reading elsewhere  though I couldn t find it again  of problems with this  In such cases where exception filtering didn t work correctly  they would catch the closest Type they could and then use a switch  The following just catches Exception instead of RuntimeException  but is the switch equivalent of my first example that checks all base types of ItemNotFoundException   try     Remove-Item C  nonexistent file txt -ErrorAction Stop   catch  System Exception      switch    Exception GetType   FullName         System Management Automation ItemNotFoundException          write-host  ItemNotFound             System Management Automation SessionStateException          write-host  SessionState             System Management Automation RuntimeException          write-host  RuntimeException             System SystemException          write-host  SystemException             System Exception          write-host  Exception            default   well  darn           This writes  ItemNotFound   as it should

[powershell] PowerShell try/catch/finally

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