How to fix: Starting services stored in variables - powershell

Question

I'm currently trying to make a script which does the following:
Get the services which are running
Get all services with startup type automatic, which arent running
Start all services which aren't running, but got startup type automatic.
The script will be run on different windows servers. I already tried to compare the services which should run ($servicestorun), to the one actually running ($servicesrunning), and then start the ones who aren't running but should.
Can someone here point me to the right direction or provide me with code needed to fix it?
$servicesrunning = Get-Service | Where {
$_.StartUpType –eq 'automatic' -and $_.Status –eq 'running'
} # gets running services
$servicestorun = Get-Service | Where {
$_.StartUpType –eq 'automatic' -and
$_.Status –eq 'stopped'
} # gets services with startup type automatic and status stopped
# checks if all services which should run, actually run
if ($servicestorun -eq $servicesrunning) {
echo "all good" # if positive, message all good then exit
exit
} else {
Start-Service $servicestorun # starts all services with startup type automatic and status stopped
}
And the error I'm getting:
Start-Service : Das Argument für den Parameter "InputObject" kann nicht überprüft werden.

Answer 1

Your comparison will always evaluate to "false" for 2 reasons:
PowerShell arrays are objects, and the -eq operator tests for identity of the objects, not if both array objects contain the same elements.
The two lists you're comparing are mutually exclusive, so even if you could compare the arrays using the -eq operator (which, again, you can't) the result would still be "false".
Because of that your code will always jump to the else branch, even if there are no services to start. In that situation you'll pass an empty variable to Start-Service, which results in the error you observed.
Since you want to start all services that are configured for automatic start, but aren't currently running, simply use the pipeline:
Get-Service | Where-Object {
$_.StartUpType –eq 'automatic' -and
$_.Status –ne 'running'
} | Start-Service