Topic: Reusable Code III

Notice: This post is a part of the PowerShell Monday series — a group of quick and easy to read mini lessons that briefly cover beginning and intermediate PowerShell topics. As a PowerShell enthusiast, this seemed like a beneficial way to ensure those around me at work were consistently learning new things about Windows PowerShell. At some point, I decided I would share these posts here, as well. Here’s the PowerShell Monday Table of Contents.

Back again.

We’ve made two new changes to the below code. One, we replaced powershell_ise, inside of our Get-Process command, with $Service. Two, we added a new, first line to our code. This command will prompt the user to enter a value. Read-Host will then assign that value to the $Service variable. That value will be used in the remainder of the PowerShell code every place $Service is found (there’s only the one). Now, the code is no longer only good for checking for the powershell_ise process; it’ll check for whatever process is entered.

$Service = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter a Process Name'
    Get-Process -Name $Service |
        Select-Object -Property @{N='Process Name';E={$_.Name}},
        Description,
        Company,
        @{N='Shared Memory';E={"$([Math]::Round($_.WorkingSet / 1MB)) MB"}},
        @{N='Private Memory Size';
            E={"$([Math]::Round($_.PrivateMemorySize / 1MB)) MB"}}

If you were to open notepad, you could use this code to return its process information. So let’s do that; let’s say we have notepad open and we run our code.

Enter a Process Name:

Enter a Process Name: notepad

Process Name        : notepad
Description         : Notepad
Company             : Microsoft Corporation
Shared Memory       : 9 MB
Private Memory Size : 1 MB

Our few lines of code just became useable against any running process on the computer. To be as thorough as possible, we need to consider what happens when we enter a process that isn’t actually running — what’s it going to do? Let’s close notepad and find out.

Enter a Process Name: notepad

Get-Process : Cannot find a process with the name "notepad". Verify the process name and call the cmdlet again.
At line:3 char:1
+ Get-Process -Name $Service |
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (notepad:String) [Get-Process], ProcessCommandException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NoProcessFoundForGivenName,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetProcessCommand

Get-Process doesn’t handle this gracefully, so let’s make a few more changes. We’ll first add a try-catch. The try portion will wrap the Get-Process and Select-Object commands. While it isn’t always necessary, we need to add the ErrorAction parameter name, with the Stop parameter value to Get-Process. This is required in order to prevent this error from being displayed. Forcing a terminating error isn’t always required, so don’t add it to commands when it’s not necessary. You try it without -ErrorAction. If it doesn’t work, you try -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue, and if that doesn’t work, you use -ErrorAction Stop, as we’ve done here.

The catch portion of our try-catch wraps a newly added, Write-Warning command that will gracefully indicate when a process isn’t running, or perhaps, just wasn’t spelled correctly.

$Service = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter a Process Name'

try {
    Get-Process -Name $Service -ErrorAction Stop |
        Select-Object -Property @{N='Process Name';E={$_.Name}},
            Description,
            Company,
            @{N='Shared Memory';E={"$([Math]::Round($_.WorkingSet / 1MB)) MB"}},
            @{N='Private Memory Size';
                E={"$([Math]::Round($_.PrivateMemorySize / 1MB)) MB"}}
} catch {
    Write-Warning -Message "Cannot locate the $Service process."
}


Here’s what happens now, when you enter a process that isn’t running, or doesn’t even exist.

[powershell]
Enter a Process Name: notepad
WARNING: Cannot locate the notepad process.

Enter a Process Name: asdf
WARNING: Cannot locate the asdf process.

That’s it for this Monday. Keep paying attention; it’s about to get good.