Powershell: get output from Receive-Job

Question

I have a collection of jobs that are running. When they complete I use receive-job and it writes the output to the screen. I\'d like to take that output and log it to a file

Answer 1

When you receive the results of a job those results are deleted such that further calls to Receive-Job will have nothing to retrieve (assuming the job is completed). If you don't want Receive-Job to delete the results use the -Keep switch. Now this doesn't explain why your first call to Receive-Job isn't outputting anything to the log file ... unless there is a part of the script you're not showing that is doing a Receive-Job before this.

Answer 2

You could pipe your Get-Process to Format-Table, so you can see all of the output.

    Get-Process -Name "explorer" | format-Table -hidetableheaders -AutoSize

And you could use something like this at the end of the script...

    Get-job | Receive-Job 2>&1 >> c:\path\to\your\log\file.log

The "2>&1 >>" with grab all output from Get-Job | Receive-Job

Answer 3

I know this is old. I don't use jobs very often so I was obviously having the same problem when I stumbled on this thread. Anyway, I arrived at a different solution so I thought I'd throw it out there.

Also in PowerShell 5.1 I simply referenced the properties on the Bob Object(s) In my case this looked like:

$Jobs.ChildJobs.Output | Out-File <LogFile> -Append

It looks like all the streams are recorded in this way. Simple echoes go to the Output. Write-Host commands go to Information Stream.

Output        : {}
Error         : {}
Progress      : {}
Verbose       : {}
Debug         : {}
Warning       : {}
Information   : {}

At any rate I hope that's helpful to someone.

Answer 4

A simple solution to the problem. Write-Verbose "blabla" -Verbose

---

$s = New-PSSession -ComputerName "Computer"
$j = Invoke-Command -Session $s  -ScriptBlock { Write-Verbose "Message" -Verbose } -AsJob
Wait-Job $j

$Child = $j.ChildJobs[0]
$Child.Verbose | out-file d:/job.log -append

Answer 5

If the job uses Write-Host to produce output, Receive-Job returns $null, but the results get written to the host. However, if the job uses Write-Output to produce output in lieu of Write-Host, Receive-Job returns a string array [string[]] of the job output.

To demonstrate, enter this innocuous code at the PowerShell prompt:

$job = Start-Job -ScriptBlock {
    [int] $counter = 0
    while ($counter -lt 10) {
        Write-Output "Counter = $counter."
        Start-Sleep -Seconds 5
        $counter++
    }
}

Wait about 20-30 seconds for the job to produce some output, then enter this code:

$result = Receive-Job -Job $job
$result.Count
$result
$result | Get-Member

The $result object contains the strings produced by the job.

Answer 6

I found soulution how to receive Write-Host results to variable with Receive-Job CMDlet, it's working on Powershell 5.1:

$var = Receive-Job $job 6>&1