PowerShell: try-catch not working

Question

I have a PowerShell script that gets a list of file names from a file, searches a folder for the file names, archives them, and then does other stuff.

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Answer 1

Your first problem is the try/catch as you know. Taking a brief look at the documentation for about_Try_Catch_Finally you will see that..

Use Try, Catch, and Finally blocks to respond to or handle terminating errors in scripts.

Your Copy-Item line is not throwing a terminating error. We fix that with the common parameter -ErrorAction

Copy-Item -Path $current_file -Destination $archive_path -ErrorAction Stop

So if there is a problem then the Catch block should be called. Assuming that was the real issue there.

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You have another issue I think as well that might just be a typo. I see the following snippet more than once.

$file_list[$i].Line

Earlier you have declared $file_list as "D:\some_folder\file_list.txt" which is a string. I think what you meant to have is below. The above code would be null since string dont have a line property. But the return from Select-String can!

$files_to_retrieve[$i].Line