I was working on some Powershell automation for a weekly process for one of my colleagues and set up the powershell script to run via a SQL 2014 agent job.  After some initial permissions errors I ran into this error:

Executed as user: <Agent Account>. A job step received an error at line 3 in a PowerShell script. The corresponding line is ‘$space.ForegroundColor = $host.ui.rawui.ForegroundColor ‘. Correct the script and reschedule the job. The error information returned by PowerShell is: ‘Exception setting “ForegroundColor”: “Cannot convert null to type “System.ConsoleColor” due to enumeration values that are not valid. Specify one of the following enumeration values and try again. The possible enumeration values are “Black,DarkBlue,DarkGreen,DarkCyan,DarkRed, DarkMagenta,DarkYellow,Gray,DarkGray,Blue,Green,Cyan,Red,Magenta,Yellow,White”.”  ‘.  Process Exit Code -1.  The step failed.

  This was really confusing at first because there was certainly no code that manipulated the console output – I was running from an agent job.  After a little testing I found the error to be with a piece of code within my script which DOES manipulate the console output – specifically the native CLS function.  As that was obviously part of the process of me testing the code and not anything I was going to need for the piece of automation I was working on removing the “CLS” from my script resolved the problem.

The error message was really misleading here, and I hope that it is addressed by Microsoft in the future.  It references a specific line of code in an agent job step, but for me that line corresponded with an echo statement.  At the least it should indicate that the error is in a called piece of code, not in the source script, and preferably shouldn’t generate an error at all, as all the output from the job step is in plain text.