How to Get Windows PowerShell to Notify You When a Job is Complete

Supposing you have created a long-running job and you would like Windows PowerShell to notify you upon completion. The following excerpt from Windows PowerShell Cookbook, Second Edition can help.

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Use the Register-TemporaryEvent command to register for the event’s StateChanged event:

PS > $job = Start-Job -Name TenSecondSleep { Start-Sleep 10 }
PS > Register-TemporaryEvent $job StateChanged -Action {
     [Console]::Beep(100,100)
     Write-Host "Job #$($sender.Id) ($($sender.Name)) complete."
}

PS > Job #6 (TenSecondSleep) complete.
PS >

When a job completes, it raises a StateChanged event to notify subscribers that its state has changed. We can use PowerShell’s event handling cmdlets to register for notifications about this event, but they are not geared toward this type of one-time event handling. To solve that, we use the Register-TemporaryEvent command.

In our example action block in that solution, we simply emit a beep and write a message saying that the job is complete.

As another option, you can also update your prompt function to highlight jobs that are complete but still have output you haven’t processed:

$psJobs = @(Get-Job -State Completed | ? { $_.HasMoreData })
if($psJobs.Count -gt 0) { ($psJobs | Out-String).Trim() | Write-Host -Fore Yellow }