SPE prevent Get-Item from throwing error if no item found

Question

I'm writing a script to show the missing/new items between two content branches. For the target of the comparison, I build an item path and then call Get-Item on that path to see if there is an equivalent item. The problem is that Get-Item throws an exception if no item is found - I would just like to handle a case of a 'null' item in my script.

#$source is the root path of the source branch
$localPath = $sourceItem.Paths.FullPath.SubString($source.Length)
$targetPath = "master:" + $target + "/" + $localPath
$targetItem = Get-Item $targetPath

The script works in that $targetItem is null if no item is found using $targetPath but I would like to suppress the error message in the script.

Answer 1

Just use the standard PowerShell error handling parameters:

$localPath = $sourceItem.Paths.FullPath.SubString($source.Length)
$targetPath = "master:" + $target + "/" + $localPath
$targetItem = Get-Item $targetPath -ErrorAction Ignore

Sounds like in your case this would be more than enough. But if you want the ability to check for other potential errors, you could combine the SilentlyContinue action with the ErrorVariable option, and then act out based on what's in the variable. For instance:

# ...
$targetItem = Get-Item $targetPath -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorVariable myError
if ($myError.Count -gt 0 -and
    !($myError[0].FullyQualifiedErrorId.Contains("ItemDoesNotExist"))) {
    Write-Warning $myError[0]
}

Lots more details in this blog post: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2014/07/09/handling-errors-the-powershell-way/