Why is my text file incomplete after using StreamWriter object? - powershell

Question

I wrote a small program which generates big text files. I found using a StreamWriter is much, much faster than other methods I know. But the end of each text file is missing.
I reduced the program to a very simple snippet to spot the problem, but I'm still unable to understand how to solve it.
#$stream = [System.IO.StreamWriter] "test.txt"
# also tested with $stream = New-Object System.IO.StreamWriter("test.txt")
$i = 1
while($i -le 500) {
$stream.WriteLine("$i xxxxxx")
$i++
}
$stream.flush # flushing don't change anything
$stream.close # also tested with $stream.dispose
exit 0
Problem 1:
The end of the file is missing. Depending of line length, the last line is around 495, generaly cut in the middle of the line.
Problem 2:
When the program is finished, the text file is still locked (we can read it, but not delete/rename). We have to exit from PowerShell to gain full access to the file.
Tested on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 with exact same result.
EDIT
dugas found the problem: I forgotten some parenthesis. Which solve the problem show with my code snippet.
But my original program have the parenthesis. So I mark this question as solved, and will open a new one when I'll found a better snippet for this specific problem.
EDIT 2
Got it. I had a hidden exception. Many thanks !

Answer 1

You are missing parenthesis when calling the StreamWriter's methods:
Change:
$stream.close
to
$stream.Close()
You may also want to wrap your StreamWriter in a try/finally and call Dispose on it in the finally:
try
{
$stream = [System.IO.StreamWriter] "C:\Users\168357\Documents\test2.txt"
$stream.WriteLine("xxxxxx")
}
finally
{
if ($stream -ne $NULL)
{
$stream.Dispose()
}
}