How to make powershell tell me about missing DLLs? - windows

Question

I use powershell as shell in Windows. When I'm trying to launch some application who's dll dependencies are missing in PATH environment variable, then nothing happens, powershell just silently returns with new command prompt.
Is there a way to make powershell fail louder, telling me what exactly is missing, like default cmd shell does?

Answer 1

I was having this same problem. PowerShell was setting $LASTEXITCODE code to -1073741515 (0xC0000142, 3221225794) but no output explaining what was actually wrong. When running it via cmd.exe I would get popup with something like:
The code execution cannot proceed because some.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.
cygwin bash outputs errors relating to dll not found to stderr and if you run the the same via bash from PowerShell then you can see the error:
> & 'C:\tools\cygwin\bin\bash.exe' '-c' '"C:/Users/xxx/dir/main.exe"'
C:/Users/xxx/dir/main.exe: error while loading shared libraries: another.dll: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This works with git bash also:
> & 'C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe' '-c' '"C:/Users/xxx/dir/main.exe"'
C:/Users/xxx/dir/main.exe: error while loading shared libraries: another.dll: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Quite a hack but better than nothing.

Answer 2

You could echo the %ERROR% variable, which stores errors until the PowerShell window is closed.
Update: In PowerShell, you could use the Get-Error command, or look at the $Error variable.
Another way would be to use Dependancy walker, if you can use a command line option, then you should be able to use this in PowerShell.

Answer 3

I am afraid there is no way to get that info... But try to read
An Introduction to Error Handling in PowerShell http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kebab/archive/2013/06/09/an-introduction-to-error-handling-in-powershell.aspx
or
PowerShell Tutorial – Try Catch Finally and error handling in PowerShell
http://www.vexasoft.com/blogs/powershell/7255220-powershell-tutorial-try-catch-finally-and-error-handling-in-powershell
Try
{
$AuthorizedUsers = Get-Content \\ FileServer\HRShare\UserList.txt -ErrorAction Stop
}
Catch [System.OutOfMemoryException]
{
Restart-Computer localhost
}
Catch
{
$ErrorMessage = $_.Exception.Message
$FailedItem = $_.Exception.ItemName
Send-MailMessage -From ExpensesBot#MyCompany.Com -To WinAdmin#MyCompany.Com -Subject "HR File Read Failed!" -SmtpServer EXCH01.AD.MyCompany.Com -Body "We failed to read file $FailedItem. The error message was $ErrorMessage"
Break
}
Finally
{
$Time=Get-Date
"This script made a read attempt at $Time" | out-file c:\logs\ExpensesScript.log -append
}