Handling Native Applications in PowerShell 7.3+ with $PSNativeCommandErrorActionPreference

• powershell
• automation
• devops

I’ve previously written a blog post about how to handle Azure CLI errors in PowerShell. The general pattern involves redirecting any error streams to the correct place, and checking for a known exit code. There’s an exciting new feature in PowerShell from version 7.3 onwards that makes capturing errors for native applications like the Azure CLI much simpler. Enter: $PSNativeCommandErrorActionPreference

PSNativeCommandErrorActionPreference is a preference variable that when set to true, allows for native commands to be handled in a more ‘PowerShell’ way.

To enable it, you just need to set $PSNativeCommandErrorActionPreference = $true somewhere in your script, and then you can use a conventional try/catch for your error handling. Check out this before/after example:

Before

1. Assign variable to output
2. Redirect the error stream and assign to variable $err to ensure any error(s) get captured
3. If the $LASTEXITCODE isn’t a success, throw the contents of the $err variable

$err = $($podList = kubectl get pods) 2>&1
if ($LASTEXITCODE -ne 0) {
    throw $err
}

After

1. Set the $PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference to true
2. Set $ErrorActionPreference to Stop
3. Handle the error in a traditional try/catch and it’ll throw if there’s a non-zero exit code (Note you may still want to redirect the error stream depending on the command)

$PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference = $true
$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'

try {
    $podList = kubectl get pods
} catch {
    throw
}