Powershell - if a process is not running, start it

Question

Noob help please. I\'m trying to write a script that will check if a process is running, and if not, start it. If the process is running, it should do nothing. I\'ve come up wit

Answer 1

In the Get-Process cmdlet, the process name argument must be the name of the executable without the file extension. Try substituting $Prog = "C:\utilities\prog.exe" with $Prog = "prog".

In my opinion, your script would be more readable if you filtered the process out using the Where-Object cmdlet instead. Here's an example:

$programName = "prog"
$isRunning = (Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq $programName }).Count -gt 0

if ($isRunning)
 # ...
else
 # ...

That way you can get rid of the -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue argument, which can be confusing to someone who is not aware of the fact that Get-Process throws an error if it can't find a process with the specified name.