How to trigger one PS script from another after a set time, without blocking execution

Question

Say I have a file A.ps1 that calls B.ps1:

& "B.ps1"

I want the contents of B.ps1 to run after N seconds, without blocking A.ps1. In this case, A.ps1 would finish immediately, and then the contents of B.ps1 would run after a set time.

How can this be achieved?

Context

We're leveraging Release Management to deploy builds with a powershell script. Sometimes RM outputs logging data that we need into a IR_ProcessAutoOutput file - but this only gets generated once RM completes. So I want to defer execution of the "GetLogs" script for ~20 seconds without blocking, allowing RM to complete and generate the IR_ProcessAutoOutput in the meantime.

Answer 1

Use Start-Process instead of the call operator.

Start-Process 'powershell.exe' -ArgumentList '-File', 'B.ps1'

If you don't want the process to run in a different window add the parameter -NoNewWindow.

You could also run the second script as a background job:

Start-Job -Scriptblock { & 'B.ps1' }

If you want B.ps1 to start after A.ps1 already terminated you'd need to create a scheduled task, though. Or add a delay at the beginning of B.ps1:

Start-Sleep -Seconds 20
...