Find and Copy files with wildcard in filename [closed] - powershell

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I have a big folder of files and I would like to find and copy specific files. There are no subfolders - all files are in the same path.
The problem is - a part of the file is always different and it is impossible to guess, so using the wildcard is required.
Here's a script:
dir K:\ALL_FILES /s/b|for /f %%i in ('find "First File To Copy.*.jpg"') do copy "%%i" k:\COPIED_FILES
dir K:\ALL_FILES /s/b|for /f %%i in ('find "Second File to be copied.*.jpg"') do copy "%%i" k:\COPIED_FILES
The above script works if I replace * with the real part of the file name.
I would like to do it in a batch file, but may be it would be easier to do with Powershell?

Answer 1

The fact that all your files are in a single folder makes this task easier, since most PowerShell cmdlets that take a -Path parameter accept string arrays for the parameter. So if you execute the cmdlet from the directory containing your files, the -Path array can contain your wildcard match patterns. This allows all the filtering to be done by the FileSystem Provider, which is faster than using -Include or -Exclude parameters or piping files to Where-Object.
$SourceDir = 'k:\ALLFILES`
$DestDir = 'k:\COPIED_FILES'
$MatchPatterns = #('First File To Copy.*.jpg','Second File To Copy.*.jpg')
Set-Location $SourceDir
Copy-Item -Path $MatchPattterns -Destination $DestDir
If you're just working interactively at the console, you can reduce the typing burden using aliases, positional parameters, and literal parameter values:
$MatchPatterns = #('First File To Copy.*.jpg','Second File To Copy.*.jpg')
sl k:\ALLFILES
copy $MatchPattterns k:\COPIED_FILES
And if you have a larger set of match patterns, a multiline Here-String makes for easier creation/editing:
$MatchPatterns = #'
First File To Copy.*.jpg
Second File To Copy.*.jpg
...
Tenth File to Copy.*.jpg
' -split "`n"
Documentation:
Copy-Item
Files in Subfilders: Recursive copy vs. Recursive file selection
While Copy-Item has the option of a -Recurse parameter, it doesn't recurse the file selection criteria through subfolders, instead, when the target of the copy command is a directory, it controls whether or not the contents of the directory is copied along with the folder itself.
If you want to select files from a folder and its subfolders, you want to select the files using Get-ChildItem with the -Recurse parameter, and then pipe the selected files for whatever further processing you choose, be it copy, move, or whatever. A simple example, selecting all text files in a folder and its subfolders, would look like this:
Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\FolderPath' -Filter *.txt -Recurse
And while the options available to Get-ChildItem are sufficient for some scenarios, multiple criteria or matching more precise than wildcards require more advanced filtering. For those situations, you pipe the output of Get-ChildItem to Where-Object -- the "Swiss Army Knife" of object filtering in PowerShell. It can use any of the comparison operators available in PowerShell to test the properties of an object, or evaluate any script block that returns a boolean.
So, if your example contained subfolders with files you wanted to copy, you could use: (filename match patterns simplified for readability)
$SourceDir = 'k:\ALLFILES`
$DestDir = 'k:\COPIED_FILES'
Get-ChildItem -Path $SourceDir -Filter *.jpg -Recurse |
Where-Object { ($_.Name -like 'ABC.*.jpg') -or ($_.Name -like 'DEF.*.jpg')} |
Copy-Item -Destination $DestDir
And while the above Where-Object scriptblock does the trick for matching two different patterns, it could quickly become cumbersome for more than a few patterns. Using a regular expression for matching is more concise and more efficient. A regex comparison version of the above would be:
Get-ChildItem -Path $SourceDir -Filter *.jpg -Recurse |
Where-Object Name -match '(ABC|DEF)\..*\.jpg' |
Copy-Item -Destination $DestDir
You can see that the regex could be easily expanded to include more literal prefixes before becoming unwieldy. And of course, an even lengthier regex could be assigned to a string variable prior to the operation and the variable used in the operation itself.