Today I Learned: -ErrorAction Ignore 

Hi Guys, this is a quick blog post on something that I learned today on PowerShell.

Ashamed to say this… but I have never used -ErrorAction Ignore before, until today when I realized that one of the old scripts written by a colleague started to fail backward compatibility checks on Windows 7 / PowerShell v2.0. Within minutes into the google search, I found that it only works on PowerShell v3.0 and above, here is the article on Microsoft Docs for your reference.

So, there are a total of 6 action preferences, as you can see in the following screenshot after getting names in the enum: [System.Management.Automation.ActionPreference]

And usually, to suppress errors we use -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue that will not display any errors, but it will be added to $Error Automatic variable,  which is an array of error objects that represent the most recent errors occurred in PowerShell and can be used to check errors at a later stage of execution.

But, if I use -ErrorAction Ignore then, Errors are still suppressed but, now they are not added to the $Error Array variable. This can come very handy when we want to exclude errors thrown by specific cmdlets from the automatic variable: $Error . Following are the commands and screenshot for your reference:

~ Author of “PowerShell Guide to Python“,  and currently writing a Book on “Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)“

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