How to stop a PowerShell script on the first error?

Question

I want my PowerShell script to stop when any of the commands I run fail (like set -e in bash). I\'m using both Powershell commands (New-Object System.Net.

Answer 1

A slight modification to the answer from @alastairtree:

function Invoke-Call {
    param (
        [scriptblock]$ScriptBlock,
        [string]$ErrorAction = $ErrorActionPreference
    )
    & @ScriptBlock
    if (($lastexitcode -ne 0) -and $ErrorAction -eq "Stop") {
        exit $lastexitcode
    }
}

Invoke-Call -ScriptBlock { dotnet build . } -ErrorAction Stop

The key differences here are:

1. it uses the Verb-Noun (mimicing Invoke-Command)
2. implies that it uses the call operator under the covers
3. mimics -ErrorAction behavior from built in cmdlets
4. exits with same exit code rather than throwing exception with new message

Answer 2

$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop" will get you part of the way there (i.e. this works great for cmdlets).

However for EXEs you're going to need to check $LastExitCode yourself after every exe invocation and determine whether that failed or not. Unfortunately I don't think PowerShell can help here because on Windows, EXEs aren't terribly consistent on what constitutes a "success" or "failure" exit code. Most follow the UNIX standard of 0 indicating success but not all do. Check out the CheckLastExitCode function in this blog post. You might find it useful.