Overview
Intro
Often times, especially when diagnosing something you’ll want to let a long running job or command run for hours, perhaps overnight. In my example here I’ve used my most frequent flier for this, chkdsk (or in this case, the PowerShell wrapper for same, Repair-Volume).
Scripts
Perform and Capture your results
Run the command and collect the results in a variable or output it to a file. Here the results of this command are fairly easy to store in a variable, however if you are using things like old command prompt tools or something like a git command you will need to do a little more legwork to capture the results in a usable way. My favorite way to do this is as computed properties in a select statement which I’ll be covering in another post.
$ScanResult = Repair-Volume -DriveLetter c -Scan
Use Send-MailMessage to deliver the scan results to yourself
Make sure to change the from, to, and smtpserver values below to the ones appropriate to your sending/receiving environment.
Send-MailMessage -From 'a@b.com' -To 'b@a.com' -Subject 'Scan Results' -Body $ScanResult -SmtpServer 'mail.b.com'
There are other more complicated and more robust ways to do this kind of thing and I’m not advocating it as a permanent solution to something like a reporting task but it’s short, easy to remember and great for ad-hoc use, especially when troubleshooting.