<p>I need to be able to launch a process and read the output into a variable.  Then based on the return of the command I can choose to show the full output or just a selected subset.</p>

<p>So to be clear, I want to launch a text based process (psexec actually) and read the output from that command (stdout, stderr, etc) into a variable rather than have it directly outputted to the console.</p>

You left off some details regarding what kind of process, but I think
this article
from the Powershell Team Blog has whatever you'd like to do, either from piping the executable's output somewhere or utilizing
```
System.Diagnostics.Process
```
.
Now that the second option sounds like what you want to do, you can use the
```
ProcessStartInfo
```
class to feed in
```
true
```
as the
```
RedirectStandardOutput
```
property, and then read from the
```
StandardOutput
```
property of the
```
Process
```
object to do whatever you want with the output.
```
StandardError
```
works identically.