Error action not stopping script - powershell

Question

Consider this simple code:
Read-Host $path
try {
Get-ChildItem $Path -ErrorAction Continue
}
Catch {
Write-Error "Path does not exist: $path" -ErrorAction Stop
Throw
}
Write-Output "Testing"
Why is 'Testing' printed to the shell if an invalid path is specified?
The script does not stop in the catch block. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

In your Try Catch block, you need to set Get-ChildItem -ErrorAction Stop
so the exception is caught in the Catch block.
With continue, you are instructing the command to not produce a terminating error when an actual error occurs.
Edit:
Also, your throw statement is useless there and you do not need to specify an error-action for Write-Error.
Here's the modified code.
$path = Read-Host
try {
Get-ChildItem $Path -ErrorAction stop
}
Catch {
Write-Error "Path does not exist: $path"
}
Additional note
You could apply this default behavior (if that is what you want) to the entire script by setting the default action to stop using :
$ErrorActionPreference = [System.Management.Automation.ActionPreference]::Stop

Answer 2

I think this is what you need:
$path = Read-Host 'Enter a path'
try {
Get-ChildItem $Path -ErrorAction Stop
}
Catch {
Throw "Path does not exist: $path"
}
Write-Output "Testing"
Per Sage's answer, you need to change to -ErrorAction Stop in the Try block. This forces the Get-ChildItem cmdlet to throw a terminating error, which then triggers the Catch block. By default (and with the Continue ErrorAction option) it would have thrown a non-terminating error which are not caught by a try..catch.
If you then want your code to stop in the Catch block, use Throw with the message you want to return. This will produce a terminating error and stop the script (Write-Error -ErrorAction Stop will also achieve a terminating error, it's just a more complicated method. Typically you should use Write-Error when you want to return non-terminating error messages).