How can I rethrow an exception from catch block in PowerShell?

Question

Should I approach the exception handling in the same manner as .NET?

Then, how can I re-throw an exception from catch block in PowerShell?

Is throw is enough? Or would throw $_ be better?

Solution

If you would like to re-throw original exception you could use throw (most common), or throw $_, or throw $_.Exception

ps: inside catch variable $_ is not exception by itself, but System.Management.Automation.ErrorRecord that contains Exception

---

Note

The throw keyword at PowerShell behaves differently then .NET implementation: in .NET you can only throw System.Exceptions itself or its successors, but in PowerShell, you can throw anything and that is automatically wrapped up into a System.Management.Automation.RuntimeException. See snippet here.

Comments

[brianary]

Note: In C#, the throw form keeps the original exception's context (source location), but unfortunately this does not appear to be the case in PowerShell.

[D.R.]

It looks like it does nowadays!

[aggieNick02]

Oh wow. I wonder when they changed it. It definitely didn't in 2017, when I had this related question: stackoverflow.com/questions/46162493

[aggieNick02]

@D.R. - any clue when they fixed it, or link to an issue about it that got resolved. Just curious, I'm looking a bit myself but haven't found it yet.