windows - 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.WebClient) and programs (.setup.exe).

Answer 1

$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.