We all know that some processes take longer than others. Synchronously running tasks may even show you a progress bar or some other continuously updated output while they are running. If you write such scripts by yourself you hopefully do that to keep the user informed. The drawback is that your console is locked while the process is running. If you want to do something in parallel, you must open another console. No (easy) way around that.
Asynchronous tasks on the other hand, be it Powershell jobs or other processes running on your server you just triggered from your console, might run silently and once in a while, if you are interested in their progress, you have to run an additional command to get the current state of the process.
Lets assume you are administering some Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server and want to move a mailbox to another database.
You start the process with:
New-MailboxMoveRequest mailbox -TargetDatabase target_db -BadItemLimit 100
Given that everything was set up correctly the move will silently run through until it is done.
If you want to know more about the current state of all your currently running moves you run:
Get-MailboxMoveRequest -MoveStatus inprogress | Get-MailboxMoveRequestStatistics
BUT ... you have to run this every time you want to get an update on your move. This is ok, if you have other things to tinker with in your shell, but maybe you just want it to be automatically monitored, so everytime you take a look on your console window you see the up-to-date status.
This is exactly why I built this function.
Basically Watch-Command works just like Measure-Command by handing a Scriptblock used to check your process' state to the function as a parameter:
Watch-Command -Scriptblock {Get-MailboxMoveRequest -MoveStatus inprogress | Get-MailboxMoveRequestStatistics}
By default, this will run the provided Scriptblock every ten seconds showing a custom progress bar counting down the seconds to the next refresh. To not clutter your console the previous output will be overwritten by the new one.
NOTE: if your Scriptblock produces no output, the function will quit!
If you want a diffent interval for the monitoring and maybe a less prominent numeric countdown you can also set that with parameters:
Watch-Command -Scriptblock {...} -Seconds 120 -CountDownType Numeric
Other possible values for -CountDownType are Bar, which is the default setting, and HalfBar. The latter will use two seconds for each counter position in the bar to save space. If you use Bar and request more seconds as intervall than half of your console windows counts in characters, the function will automatically switch to HalfBar for aestethic reasons.
The countdown is generated by my helper function Start-CountDown, which you can find here on GitHub, too.
Watch-Command -ScriptBlock {gci d*} -Seconds 30 -CountDownType HalfBar
Verzeichnis: C:\Users\hauptbenutzer
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
d-r--- 09.12.2018 09:07 Desktop
d-r--- 09.12.2018 11:52 Documents
d-r--- 21.12.2018 21:00 Downloads
Refresh in [OOOo...........]
Hopefully, I could make the life of some of you easier.
Good luck and happy coding! Max