How do I output each processing item to file? - powershell

Question

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"} | Out-File -path $env:temp\AppXPackage.log
This performs the task that I want it to perform. However, the log file is blank.
I would like for the log file to contain both the errors, and log the individual operations.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with that particular cmdlet, you could probably try redirecting other output streams (so not stdout) to the log file, and it might work. at the very worst you can do something like this:
Foreach-Object {
try {
Add-AppxPackage ... -ErrorAction Stop
"$_ done" > success.log
} catch {
$_ > errors.log
}
}

Answer 2

The Add-AppxPackagedoesn't return anything, neither does it support -PassThru argument. However, you could push the $_ object to the pipe from the foreach block:
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers |
Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register
"$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"; $_ } |
Out-File -path $env:temp\AppXPackage.log

Answer 3

As the other 2 answers mentioned, that cmdlet doesn't seem to give any output. Which leaves you with either manual logging or redirection. I just wanted to expand a bit on the other two to give you a couple options.
For redirection, you can do something like this:
.\my_script *>> myfile.log #appen all streams (output and errors) to a file
.\my_script >> output.log 2>> errors.log #send output to one file and error stream to another
For normal logging, take a look at $error, which will contain all the errors in your session. You could start your script with $error.clear(), manually log your output you want since the cmdlet doesn't have output and then end with $error | out-file errors.log