powershell script not interpreting file path correctly - powershell

Question

I have an issue where a path to a file is generated by an application. So the path looks like this….
Unfortunately, this output is generated from an application…so I cannot manipulate the output.
Now…when I run my powershell script to copy the file …I get the following errors
It seems that the problem is that my powershell script is not getting the path correctly….
$folders = Get-Content -Path '\\TFA-APP-01\CUI\WS\FOUNDFILES\results.txt'
$dest = '\\TFA-APP-01\CUI\WS\FOUNDFILES\found\'
$excludes = "WS","FOUNDFILES"
foreach ($folder in $folders) {
# Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Where-Object{$_.FullName -like 'Desktop'} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Where-Object{$_.FullName -like 'Documents'} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Where-Object{$_.FullName -like 'Downloads'} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Where-Object{$_.FullName -like 'Outlook'} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Where-Object{$_.FullName -like 'INetCache'} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder | Where-Object{$_.Name -notin $excludes} | Where-Object{$_.FullName -like 'Attachments'} | Copy-Item -Destination $dest -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}
How can I either parse the results.txt file and extract just the file paths to another text file?
Or how can I modify my CopyResults.ps1 script to interpret the file path correctly?

Answer 1

Your issue is that Get-Content converts every line of a file into an element of an array, and you don't want to look at every line. You want to look at a specific part of a specific line that repeats in a specific pattern.
Because of all of these constants, we can make a pretty simple script to get the information you want.
$paths = Get-Content C:\temp\paths.txt
for ($i = 1; $i -lt $paths.Length; $i += 3) {
$path = "$($paths[$i].Split('.txt')[0]).txt"
$path # \\SERVER\PATH\FILE.TXT
}
Your file has a pattern of [empty line, path line, company line]. If we think about the .txt file as an array with many subarrays of that pattern, we can see that we want to get the 1st index ($i = 1) for every set of 3 ($i += 3) in the file.
Since I split by .txt, I have to string interpolate the .txt extension back on.
Edit:
Here's the script modified for your issues
$paths = Get-Content C:\temp\paths.txt
for ($i = 1; $i -lt $paths.Length; $i += 3) {
$pathSplit = $paths[$i].Split('.')
$extension = $pathSplit[1].split(' ')[0]
$path = "${$pathSplit[0]).$extension"
$path # \\SERVER\PATH\FILE.TXT
}
$pathSplit is split at the extension into 2 parts. One is the majority of the path and the other is the rest of the line.
$extension looks at the 1st index and splits by the space in order to isolate the file extension.
Finally, $path combines $pathSplit[0] and $extension to give you the full file path.