Powershell status information

Question

What is the prescribed method for display status or progress information to a user from a Powershell script? For example, "Connecting to database..." Normally I'd print to STDERR.

Powershell has a Write-Progress cmdlet, but that's for a progress bar.

Answer 1

You can use the Write-Host cmdlet. The strings displayed via write host go directly to the console and are not considered part of the output stream. For example:

function foo {
    Write-Host "Entering foo"
    "Hello World"
    Get-Date
    [Math]::Pi
    Write-Host "Exiting foo"
}

PS> $results = foo
Entering foo
Exiting foo
PS> $OFS = ', '
PS> "Outputting results: $results"
Outputting results: Hello World, 11/05/2009 18:55:24, 3.14159265358979

Note that the output from Write-Host appears immediately on the host and does not not become part of the output stream (or in this case - output of function foo).