-refresh within script block does not work

[Shigeya Tanabe]

When I tried this script,

&{get-date | out-gauge -refresh 0:0:1}

An error icon appears on the gauge which says closing "}" is missing.

I guess out-gauge captures commands before pipe so that error would be reasonable.

Any workaround to use refreshing commands within a single line script block?

[marco.shaw]

What you're doing is simply wrapping the commands so they run in their own scope (reference: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/03/07/invoke-expression.aspx).

I feel like I'm missing what you're trying to accomplish...  Why doesn't simply using 'get-date|out-gauge -refresh 0:0:1' not do what you're looking for?

Are you specifically looking to use get-date for more processing outside of that particular line?

[Edited Wednesday, August 08, 2007 7:16:15 AM AST]

[Shigeya Tanabe]

What I am trying to do is in your reference link. []

I use start-demo function mentioned in that blog post to automate demo. Start-demo reads one-liners from text file and invoke them line by line. As written in the post, it invokes command line like following,

Invoke-Expression $(".{" + $_lines[$_i] + "}| out-host")

$_lines holds one-liners read from text file.

When I added 'get-date|out-gauge -refresh 0:0:1' to my demo commands for example, out-gauge shows error I wrote earlier. Out-gauge was invoked as

.{ get-date | out-gauge -refresh 0:0:1 } | out-host

While following invokes out-gauge -refresh without error.

Invoke-Expression $(".{`n" + $_lines[$_i] + "}| out-host")

Actual lines would be

{

get-date | out-gauge -refresh 0:0:1 } | out-host

 

[marco.shaw]

Now I follow you...  The issue seems to be directly with -refresh.  When you call -refresh, what happens is that there is an invokation of another PowerShell runspace.  The entire command is passed to the new runspace, except it is cutoff just after the time value, so the "{" is included, but the "}" is not included in what is used by the new runspace.

I never tried the start-demo script with -refresh so thanks for pointing that out!

Would this be an acceptable workaround...  Add something like this to your demo.txt file:

set-content start-gadget.ps1 "get-date|out-gauge -type digital -refresh 0:0:01"get-content start-gadget.ps1./start-gadget

Basically, start-demo is going to write the commands to a file.  Using set-content will make sure to overwrite if anything is already in that file everytime start-demo is invoked.

You may want to use .NET to get a temporary file name, and use that instead?

[Shigeya Tanabe]

Thanks for your detail! Now the situation I encounter is clear.

And thanks for your workaround too.

I tried to use function start-gadget { xxx } instead of your idea, however it does not work.

So, set/get-content is the best I think.