Powershell - how to log all external cmd output?

Question

I have a powershell script that works great from cmd line, but flakes out a lot when running from task scheduler.

So I need to see all the console output from all the commands.

The script does a lot of external commands (net use, robocopy, etc). The output from these commands is what I most need.

We do not want to instrument each command, because it is ugly, and because we need to run it interactively (and see what is going on).

I tried the powershell "Start-Transcript" with -Verbose, but NONE of the commands are logged to the transcript file. Even when we followed this directive by a guy on the powershell team: | Out-Default (e.g. ipconfig.exe | Out-Default), we STILL do not see the output in the transcript.

What next?

Answer 1

Configure the logging to occur within the scheduled task via redirection of the powershell invocation:

cmd /c powershell.exe -noninteractive -file c:\temp\script.ps1 > c:\temp\some.log 2>&1 

If the ROBOCOPY log is doing more than 10 files, I would keep that separate with the /LOG:c:\temp\robo.log option that command supports.

Answer 2

Well, even if not the prettiest of solutions you could perhaps do something like the following?

net use z: \\my\path >> mylogfile.txt 2>&1 

And you could do the same with the logging abilities of robocopy, just append to the same file.