I'm learning to use Windows PowerShell and I noticed that (Get-ChildItem).Length returns file size when there is only one file in the directory. Do I have to write my own function to get the length or is there a simpler method?
That's not a bug. When there is more than one file, the command will return an array. With the property Length you will get in this case the size of the array.
Some example how to get the size:
Get-ChildItem | select -ExpandProperty Length
or
If you want to manipulate the values further, try maybe something like that
Get-ChildItem | foreach {$_.Length}
Related
My keys.csv file looks like this
PrjKey BldKey key
LS LOOKUPSNAP1 LS-LOOKUPSNAP1
LS LSUH3 LS-LSUH3
LSPERF LPMDS0 LSPERF-LPMDS0
LSPERF LSP0 LSPERF-LSP0
I want to extract the values column "key" and store in a variable. I tried this
Import-Csv .\keys.csv | select key | ft -hide
the output has a blank line at the top. How can I eliminate it. I only want those 4 values to be "stored in a variable" Yes I don't want to save the output as a csv again.
Can someone help please?
You had the right idea of using Select-Object to get the one property you want. The two issues you had was that Select-Object key returns and object array with a key property when it looks like you just want string array of keys. Also never use Format-cmdlets when you want to save the data or use it in another form. They destroy objects for the purpose of display data on the screen. So that all being said..
$keys = Import-Csv .\keys.csv | select -ExpandProperty key
Depending on your PowerShell version
$keys = (Import-Csv .\keys.csv).key
Anyone have any ideas on how to rename files by finding an association with an index file?
I have a file/folder structure like the following:
Folder name = "Doe, John EO11-123"
Several files under this folder
The index file(MS Excel) has several columns. It contains the names in 2 columns(First and Last). It also has a column containing the number EO11-123.
What I would like to do is write maybe a script to look at the folder names in a directory, compare/find an associated value in the index file(like that number EO11-123) and then rename all the files under the folder using a 4th column value in the index.
So,
Folder name = "Doe, John EO11-123", index column1 contains same value "EO11-123", use column2 value "111111_000000" and rename all the files under that directory folder to "111111_000000_0", "111111_000000_1", "111111_000000_2" and so on.
This possible with powershell or vbscript?
Ok, I'll answer your questions in your comment first. Importing the data into PowerShell allows you to make an array in powershell that you can match against, or better yet make a HashTable to reference for your renaming purposes. I'll get into that later, but it's way better than trying to have PowerShell talk to Excel and use Excel's search functions because this way it's all in PowerShell and there's no third party application dependencies. As for importing, that script is a function that you can load into your current session, so you run that function and it will automatically take care of the import for you (it opens Excel, then opens the XLS(x) file, saves it as a temp CSV file, closes Excel, imports that CSV file into PowerShell, and then deletes the temp file).
Now, you did not state what your XLS file looks like, so I'm going to assume it's got a header row, and looks something like this:
FirstName | Last Name | Identifier | FileCode
Joe | Shmoe | XA22-573 | JS573
John | Doe | EO11-123 | JD123
If that's not your format, you'll need to either adapt my code, or your file, or both.
So, how do we do this? First, download, save, and if needed unblock the script to Import-XLS. Then we will dot source that file to load the function into the current PowerShell session. Once we have the function we will run it and assign the results to a variable. Then we can make an empty hashtable, and for each record in the imported array create an entry in the hashtable where the 'Identifier' property (in your example above that would be the one that has the value "EO11-123" in it), make that the Key, then make the entire record the value. So, so far we have this:
#Load function into current session
. C:\Path\To\Import-XLS.ps1
$RefArray = Import-XLS C:\Path\To\file.xls
$RefHash = #{}
$RefArray | ForEach( $RefHash.Add($_.Identifier, $_)}
Now you should be able to reference the identifier to access any of the properties for the associated record such as:
PS C:\> $RefHash['EO11-123'].FileCode
JD123
Now, we just need to extract that name from the folder, and rename all the files in it. Pretty straight forward from here.
Get-ChildItem c:\Path\to\Folders -directory | Where{$_.Name -match "(?<= )(\S+)$"}|
ForEach{
$Files = Get-ChildItem $_.FullName
$NewName = $RefHash['$($Matches[1])'].FileCode
For($i = 1;$i -lt $files.count;$i++){
$Files[$i] | Rename-Item -New "$NewName_$i"
}
}
Edit: Ok, let's break down the rename process here. It is a lot of piping here, so I'll try and take it step by step. First off we have Get-ChildItem that gets a list of folders for the path you specify. That part's straight forward enough. Then it pipes to a Where statement, that filters the results checking each one's name to see if it matches the Regular Expression "(?<= )(\S+)$". If you are unfamiliar with how regular expressions work you can see a fairly good breakdown of it at https://regex101.com/r/zW8sW1/1. What that does is matches any folders that have more than one "word" in the name, and captures the last "word". It saves that in the automatic variable $Matches, and since it captured text, that gets assigned to $Matches[1]. Now the code breaks down here because your CSV isn't laid out like I had assumed, and you want the files named differently. We'll have to make some adjustments on the fly.
So, those folder that pass the filter will get piped into a ForEach loop (which I had a typo in previously and had a ( instead of {, that's fixed now). So for each of those folders it starts off by getting a list of files within that folder and assigning them to the variable $Files. It also sets up the $NewName variable, but since you don't have a column in your CSV named 'FileCode' that line won't work for you. It uses the $Matches automatic variable that I mentioned earlier to reference the hashtable that we setup with all of the Identifier codes, and then looks at a property of that specific record to setup the new name to assign to files. Since what you want and what I assumed are different, and your CSV has different properties we'll re-work both the previous Where statement, and this line a little bit. Here's how that bit of the script will now read:
Get-ChildItem c:\Path\to\Folders -directory | Where{$_.Name -match "^(.+?), .*? (\S+)$"}|
ForEach{
$Files = Get-ChildItem $_.FullName
$NewName = $Matches[2] + "_" + $Matches[1]
That now matches the folder name in the Where statement and captures 2 things. The first thing it grabs is everything at the beginning of the name before the comma. Then it skips everything until it gets tho the last piece of text at the end of the name and captures everything after the last space. New breakdown on RegEx101: https://regex101.com/r/zW8sW1/2
So you want the ID_LName, which can be gotten from the folder name, there's really no need to even use your CSV file at this point I don't think. We build the new name of the files based off the automatic $Matches variable using the second capture group and the first capture group and putting an underscore between them. Then we just iterate through the files with a For loop basing it off how many files were found. So we start with the first file in the array $Files (record 0), add that to the $NewName with an underscore, and use that to rename the file.
I am sorting a large directory of files and I am trying to select individual lines from the output of an ls command and show those only, but I get weird results and I am not familiar enough with powershell to know what I'm doing wrong.
this approach works:
ls > data.txt
select-string 2012 data.txt
rm data.txt
but it seems wasteful to me to create a file just to read the data that I already have to fill into the file. I want to pipe the output directly to select-string.
I have tried this approach:
ls | select-string 2012
but that does not give me the appropriate output.
My guess is that I need to convert the output from ls into something select-string can work with, but I have no idea how to do that, or even whether that is actually the correct approach.
PowerShell is object-oriented, not pure text like cmd. If you want to get fileobjects(lines) that were modified in 2012, use:
Get-ChildItem | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime.Year -eq 2012 }
If you want to get fileobjects with "2012" in the filename, try:
Get-ChildItem *2012*
When you use
ls | select-string 2012
you're actually searching for lines with "2012" INSIDE every file that ls / get-childitem listed.
If you really need to use select-string on the output from get-childitem, try converting it to strings, then splitting up into lines and then search it. Like this:
(Get-ChildItem | Out-String) -split "`n" | Select-String 2012
I found another simple way to convert objects to strings:
Get-ChildItem | Out-String -stream | Select-String 2012
in this very interesting article:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2006/04/25/how-does-select-string-work-with-pipelines-of-objects.aspx
If you wanted Select-String to work on the Monad formatted output, you'll need to get that as a string. Here is the thing to grok about
our outputing. When your command sequence emits a stream of strings,
we emit it without processing. If instead, your command sequence
emits a stream of objects, then we redirect those objects to the
command Out-Default. Out-Default looks at the type of the object and
the registered formating metadata to see if there is a default view
for that object type. A view defines a FORMATTER and the metadata for
that command. Most objects get vectored to either Format-Table or
Format-List (though they could go to Format-Wide or Format-Custom).
THESE FORMATTERS DO NOT EMIT STRINGS! You can see this for yourself
by the following: "These formating records are then vectored to an
OUT-xxx command to be rendered into the appropriate data for a
particular output device. By default, they go to Out-Host but you can
pipe this to Out-File, Out-Printer or Out-String. (NOTE: these
OUT-xxx commands are pretty clever, if you pipe formating objects to
them, they'll render them. If you pipe raw object to them, they'll
first call the appropriate formatter and then render them.)
I have a binary cmdlet Get-CustomPSObject. When I do something like:
Get-CustomPSObject > a.txt
the result is stored as a plain text, meaning that the Get-CustomPSObject is working fine.
However when I try:
Get-CustomPSObject | Export-csv a.csv
The a.csv file becomes:
"Capacity","Count","IsReadOnly","IsFixedSize","SyncRoot","IsSynchronized"
"4","1","False","False","System.Object","False"
none of these fields are in my PSObject. I've no idea what they stands for. Any thoughts?
Export-CSV takes the first object it recieves to create the headers. Most likely, your Get-CustomPSOjbect runs a method/cmdlet/script that returns an object you didn't save. E.g. you use something like
get-childitem
and not
$files = get-childitem
inside your Get-CustomPSObject function.
EDIT
Okay, so you're cmdlet is a binary cmdlet. Important information. I'm no expert in this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
When you make a binary cmdlet that can output multiple objects, you need to write them one by one. One of the ideas behind PowerShell is the use of a pipeline that can use objects as they come without waiting for the complete array.
Because of your current "design flaw" in your binary cmdlet, Export-CSV tries to export the array(as one item) to a csv-file and not the elements inside.
You now use this:
WriteObject(list/array of objects)
This is bad. It outputs all objects at the same time.
To fix it, run this at the end of your "object-creation-loop":
WriteObject(mycurrentobject)
This is good. You enable the use of pipeline and every object is sent out one by one when they're created. Export-CSV can then recieve each object and convert them to csv-format.
In your first example using > the output is run through Powershell formatting system while in the second using export-csv it is not.
If you look at get-custompsobject | gm you should see those extra properties that aren't shown in console or sent to your text file.
For export-csv you can control which properties are sent to the csv file using select-object
get-custompsobjct | select-object column1, column2 | export-csv a.csv
I am writing a script which will basically do the following:
Read from a text file some arguments:
DriveLetter ThreeLetterCode ServerName VolumeLetter Integer
Eg. W MSS SERVER01 C 1
These values happen to form a folder destination W:\MSS\, and a filename which works in the following naming convention:
SERVERNAME_VOLUMELETTER_VOL-b00X-iYYY.spi - Where The X is the Integer above
The value Y I need to work out later, as this happens to be the value of the incremental image (backups) and I need to work out the latest incremental.
So at the moment --> Count lines in file, and loop for this many lines.
$lines = Get-Content -Path PostBackupCheck-Textfile.txt | Measure-Object -Line
for ($i=0; $i -le $lines.Lines; $i++)
Within this loop I need to do a Get-Content to read off the line I am currently looking at i.e. line 0, line 1, line 2, as there will be multiple lines in the format I wrote at the beginning and split the line into an array, whereby each part of the file, as seen above naming convention, is in a[0], a[1], a[2]. etc
The reason for this is because, I need to then sort the folder that contains these, find the latest file, by date, and take the _iXXX.spi part and place this into the array value a[X] so I then have a complete filename to mount. This value will replace iYYY.spi
It's a little complex because I also have to make sure when I do a Get-ChildItem with -Include before I sort it all by date, I am only including the filename that matches the arguments fed to it from the text file :
So,
SERVER01_C_VOL-b001-iYYY.spi and not anything else.
i.e. not SERVER01_D_VOL-b001-iYYY.spi
Then take the iYYY value from the sort on the Get-ChildItem -Include and place that into the appropriate array item.
I've literally no idea where to start, so any ideas are appreciated!
Hopefully I've explained in enough detail. I have also placed the code on Pastebin: http://pastebin.com/vtFifTW6
This doesn't need to be that complex. You can start by operating over lines in your file with a simple pipeline:
Get-Content PostBackupCheck-Textfile.txt |
Foreach-Object {
$drive, $folder, $server, $volume, [int]$i = -split $_
...
}
The line inside the loop splits the current input line at spaces and assigns appropriate variables. This saves you the trouble of handling an array there. Everything that follows needs to be in said loop as well.
You can then construct the file name pattern:
$filename = "$server_$drive_VOL-b$($i.ToString('000'))-i*.spi"
which you can use to find all fitting files and sort them by date:
$lastFile = Get-ChildItem $filename | sort LastWriteTime | select -last 1