Can I get “&&” or “-and” to work in PowerShell?

Question

&& is notoriously hard to search for on Google Search, but the best I\'ve found is this article which says to use -and.

Unfortunatel

Answer 1

In CMD, '&&' means "execute command 1, and if it succeeds, execute command 2". I have used it for things like:

build && run_tests

In PowerShell, the closest thing you can do is:

(build) -and (run_tests)

It has the same logic, but the output text from the commands is lost. Maybe it is good enough for you, though.

If you're doing this in a script, you will probably be better off separating the statements, like this:

build
if ($?) {
    run_tests
}

2019/11/27: The &&operator is now available for PowerShell 7 Preview 5+:

PS > echo "Hello!" && echo "World!"
Hello!
World!

Answer 2

A verbose equivalent is to combine $LASTEXITCODE and -eq 0:

msbuild.exe args; if ($LASTEXITCODE -eq 0) { echo 'it built'; } else { echo 'it failed'; }

I'm not sure why if ($?) didn't work for me, but this one did.

Answer 3

If your command is available in cmd.exe (something like python ./script.py, but not PowerShell command like ii . (this means to open the current directory by Windows Explorer)), you can run cmd.exe within PowerShell. The syntax is like this:

cmd /c "command1 && command2"

Here, && is provided by cmd syntax described in this question.

Answer 4

I think a simple if statement can accomplish this. Once I saw mkelement0's response that the last exit status is stored in $?, I put the following together:

# Set the first command to a variable
$a=somecommand

# Temporary variable to store exit status of the last command (since we can't write to "$?")
$test=$?

# Run the test
if ($test=$true) { 2nd-command }

So for the OP's example, it would be:

a=(csc /t:exe /out:a.exe SomeFile.cs); $test = $?; if ($test=$true) { a.exe }

Answer 5

Just install PowerShell 7 (go here, and scroll and expand the assets section). This release has implemented the pipeline chain operators.

Answer 6

&& and || were on the list of things to implement (still are) but did not pop up as the next most useful thing to add. The reason is that we have -AND and -OR. If you think it is important, please file a suggestion on Connect and we'll consider it for V3.