Redirect standard error to a variable in PowerShell

I would like to script a dcdiag test to alert me if it finds any errors. I thought I may able to do this in PowerShell by...

$test = dcdiag 2>$err

I don't have any errors from dcdiag at the moment, so I couldn't test that directly, but I wrote another PowerShell script to throw an exception, hoping I could test this method using that script. This didn't work using the method above so I opted for:

try {
    $test = dcdiag
}
catch { 
    $err = $_.Exception.Message
}

It worked for my test case, but I don't know if this will pick up standard error from dcdiag.

How should I best achieve standard error redirect to a variable in PowerShell given I would like to use it with dcdiag?

Solution 1:

try...catch wouldn't help in this case.

You might want to do:

$test = dcdiag 2>&1
$err = $test | ?{$_.gettype().Name -eq "ErrorRecord"}
if($err){
    # Error has occurred
}