Powershell analogue of Bash's `set -e`

$ErrorActionPreference works as intended, it's just that exit codes from native programs are not nearly as well-behaved as PowerShell cmdlets.

For a cmdlet the error condition is fairly easy to determine: Did an exception happen or not? So the following would not reach the Write-Host statement with $ErrorActionPreference set to Stop:

Write-Error blah

or

Get-ChildItem somepathwhichsurelydoesntexisthere

For native programs an exit code of zero usually signals that no error occurred but that's merely a convention, as is a non-zero exit code signalling an error. Would you say that if choice exists with an exit code of 1 that it was an error?

The only robust way to handle this is to check the exit code after running a native command and handling it yourself, if needed. PowerShell doesn't try to guess what the result meant because the conventions aren't strong enough to warrant a default behaviour in this case.

You can use a function if you want to make your life easier:

function Invoke-NativeCommand {  $command = $args[0]  $arguments = $args[1..($args.Length)]  & $command @arguments  if ($LastExitCode -ne 0) {    Write-Error "Exit code $LastExitCode while running $command $arguments"  }}

But in general many programs need different handling because they don't adhere to said convention.