Powershell Job "Completed" but did not finish it's task

Question

I am trying to start/stop services via a job in powershell. In testing this on my local machine, the job will go to a completed state but the service will not change its status. Is there a way to get a better view of what my job did?

Here is the code:

$service = 'MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS'
$server = 'myPC'
$myJob = Start-Job -Scriptblock {Get-Service -Name $args[0] -computername $args[1] | Set-Service -Status Running} -ArgumentList @($service,$server)
sleep -Seconds 10
get-job

The SQL SQL (EXPRESS) service does not start when I run that snippet.

However, if I ran the following from the elevated shell, it would start:

Get-Service -Name $service -computername $server | Set-Service -Status Running

When I run Get-Job, here is what I see...

Id     Name            PSJobTypeName   State         HasMoreData     Location             Command                  
--     ----            -------------   -----         -----------     --------             -------                  
10     Job10           BackgroundJob   Completed     True            localhost            Get-Service -Name $arg...

These are both running from an elevated shell, so I definitely have permission to start/stop the service.

Answer 1

Use Get-Job | Receive-Job to see the output from your jobs (including any errors).

Or (to be more specific) for the job you created:

$myjob | Receive-Job

Also FYI, rather than Start-Sleep, you could do $myjob | Wait-Job to wait for the job to complete before continuing code execution. You can also:

$myjob | Wait-Job | Receive-Job