Powershell | Stuck in while loop - powershell

Question

I have a small script that checks the communication date of the mcafee agent:
$GetLastCommunication = & "C:\Program Files\McAfee\Agent\cmdagent" -i | Select-String -Pattern LastASCTIME | Out-String
$GetLastCommunication = $GetLastCommunication.Replace("`n", "").Replace("`r", "").Replace(" ","")
Start-Job -ScriptBlock {
$newagentdir = (Get-ChildItem -Recurse "\\IP\Downloads\" -Include "FramePkg.exe").FullName
$arg = "/forceinstall /install=agent /silent"
Copy-Item -Path $newagentdir -Destination $env:TEMP
Start-Process -Wait $env:TEMP\FramePkg.exe -ArgumentList $arg
}
while ($GetLastCommunication = "LastASCTime:N/A"){
sleep -Seconds 5
}
Reload-Form
after the installation, the LastASCTime line changes automatically from "N/A" to the time of communication, after 15 to 20 seconds.
I need for him to reload the form when the LastASCTime line changes from N/A to the comm time.
Currently, is getting stuck in the while loop and doesn’t reload the form.
Any ideas why?
Thanks

Answer 1

Your code is essentially...
$lastKnownState = Get-SomeState
while ($lastKnownState -eq $operationInProgressState)
{
sleep -Seconds 5
}
Your loop is waiting 5 seconds between checking if the operation has completed, but because $lastKnownState is just a snapshot of the operation's state and not modified inside the loop, the loop will never terminate.
Instead, you need to actually refresh the state after the timeout...
$lastKnownState = Get-SomeState
while ($lastKnownState -eq $operationInProgressState)
{
sleep -Seconds 5
$lastKnownState = Get-SomeState
}
In your code, after correcting the = assignment operator to the -eq comparison operator, that would look like this...
while ($GetLastCommunication -eq "LastASCTime:N/A"){
sleep -Seconds 5
$GetLastCommunication = & "C:\Program Files\McAfee\Agent\cmdagent" -i | Select-String -Pattern LastASCTIME | Out-String
$GetLastCommunication = $GetLastCommunication.Replace("`n", "").Replace("`r", "").Replace(" ","")
}
Also, instead of chaining calls to Replace() with...
$GetLastCommunication = $GetLastCommunication.Replace("`n", "").Replace("`r", "").Replace(" ","")
...you can use the -replace operator with a regular expression that will match and remove CR, LF, or space characters...
$GetLastCommunication = $GetLastCommunication -replace '[\r\n ]'
Those characters are being escaped for the .NET regular expression engine and not PowerShell, which is why backslashes are used instead of backticks. If what you really want to do is match LF optionally preceded by a CR (i.e. CRLF or LF) that can be matched with \r?\n...
$GetLastCommunication = $GetLastCommunication -replace '\r?\n| '