How to tell PowerShell to wait for each command to end before starting the next

Question

I have a PowerShell 1 0 script to just open a bunch of applications  The first is a virtual machine and the others are development applications   I want the virtual machine to finish booting before the rest of the applications are opened   In bash I could just say  cmd1  amp  amp  cmd2   This is what I ve got     C  Applications VirtualBox vboxmanage startvm superdooper      amp  C  Applications NetBeans 6 5 bin netbeans exe

User · Accepted Answer

Normally  for internal commands PowerShell does wait before starting the next command   One exception to this rule is external Windows subsystem based EXE   The first trick is to pipeline to Out-Null like so   Notepad exe   Out-Null   PowerShell will wait until the Notepad exe process has been exited before continuing   That is nifty but kind of subtle to pick up from reading the code   You can also use Start-Process with the -Wait parameter   Start-Process  lt path to exe gt  -NoNewWindow -Wait   If you are using the PowerShell Community Extensions version it is    proc   Start-Process  lt path to exe gt  -NoNewWindow -PassThru  proc WaitForExit     Another option in PowerShell 2 0 is to use a background job    job   Start-Job   invoke command here   Wait-Job  job Receive-Job  job

User · Answer

There s always cmd   It may be less annoying if you have trouble quoting arguments to start-process  cmd  c start  wait notepad  Or notepad   out-host

User · Answer

If you use Start-Process  lt path to exe gt  -NoNewWindow -Wait  You can also use the -PassThru option to echo output

User · Answer

Just use  Wait-process      notepad   calc   wmplayer    ForEach-Object  Start-Process       Wait-Process  dir   job is done

User · Answer

Some programs can t process output stream very well   using pipe to Out-Null may not block it  And Start-Process needs the -ArgumentList switch to pass arguments  not so convenient  There is also another approach     exitCode    Diagnostics Process   Start  lt process gt   lt arguments gt   WaitForExit  lt timeout gt

User · Answer

Including the option -NoNewWindow gives me an error  Start-Process   This command cannot be executed due to the error  Access is denied   The only way I could get it to work was to call   Start-Process  lt path to exe gt  -Wait

User · Answer

Taking it further you could even parse on the fly  e g    amp   my exe           if     -match  OK         Write-Host    -f Green       else if     -match  FAIL ERROR         Write-Host    -f Red       else        Write-Host

User · Answer

Besides using Start-Process -Wait  piping the output of an executable will make Powershell wait  Depending on the need  I will typically pipe to Out-Null  Out-Default  Out-String or Out-String -Stream  Here is a long list of some other output options    Saving output as a string to a variable   output   ping exe example com   Out-String    Filtering the output  ping stackoverflow com   where      -match   reply       Using Start-Process affords the most control  Start-Process -Wait SomeExecutable com  I do miss the CMD Bash style operators that you referenced   amp    amp  amp        It seems we have to be more verbose with Powershell

[powershell] How to tell PowerShell to wait for each command to end before starting the next?

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