How to check whether a specific service exists using Powershell?

Question

Introduction

According to this documentation it is possible to check which services have been stopped on Windows by executing the following command:

Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.status -eq "stopped"}

in PowerShell.

Question

Which command needs to be issued in PowerShell in order to check whether a certain service, e.g. tomcat8 exists?

Answer 1

You can specify the service name using the -Name attribute. By default if it doesn't see a matching service it will give an error. Using -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue you can get an empty variable back.

$service = Get-Service -Name W32Time -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Once you have that you can just see if the length is greater than 0.

if ($service.Length -gt 0) {
    # Do cool stuff
    }