Error handling

Chapter 2, PowerShell Peculiarities introduced PowerShell's two error-handling mechanisms: the trap statement and the try, catch, and finally statements. That chapter explained how these statements function in PowerShell code. The following sections will give you some guidance on how to use them effectively and some techniques for writing error-handling code.

Error-handling guidelines

The first thing to mention is that although the trap statement can be effective for handling errors, its flow can be confusing, especially when considering the many ways to exit a trap statement. For this reason, it is a good idea to avoid the trap statement in most cases and use the try / catch / finally constructions instead. Since environments that only support PowerShell Version 1.0 are not very common, try, catch, and finally can be used almost everywhere. Also, the flow of try / catch / finally is much more linear, leading to less confusion about the flow of execution.

A second point is that...