Why recurse is not working in if statement? - powershell

Question

I'm trying to write script which will copy content of files with .txt extension to one. Script is working but -recurse is not. (It dosn't copy files which are in sub folders) and I don't know why is that. This is how my script looks like:
function UnifyConfigs {
param (
$destination = "C:\temp\all.txt",
[Parameter()]
$files
)
foreach ($config in $files) {
If((Get-ChildItem $config -Recurse).LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Item $destination).LastWriteTime)
{
Clear-Content -path $destination
Set-Content -path $destination -value (Get-Content $config)
}
else {
break
}
}
}
And yes: I have tried it with -force :-)

Answer 1

First up, you need to move the Get-ChildItem -Recurse call to where you resolve the input string to actual files in the filesystem:
foreach ($config in Get-ChildItem $files -Recurse) {
if($config.LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Item $destination).LastWriteTime)
{
Clear-Content -path $destination
Set-Content -path $destination -value (Get-Content $config)
}
else {
break
}
}
If you just want to test that any of the input files are newer than the destination file and then overwrite the contents of the destination with all of the other txt files, that actually becomes a tad simpler - we can discard the outer loop completely:
# Discover all the files
$configFiles = Get-ChildItem $files -Recurse
# use `-gt` and the destination timestamp to "filter" all the config file timestamps
# if _any_ of them are newer that $destination, then the condition is true
if(#($configFiles.LastWriteTime) -gt (Get-Item $destination).LastWriteTime){
# pipe every file to Get-Content, and then overwrite $destination with the whole thing
$configFiles |Get-Content |Set-Content -Path $destination -Force
}
I'd also recommend refactoring the parameter names to better reflect what the expected input is ("C:\path\to*files" is a string representing a "path", it is not "files"):
function Update-UnifiedConfig {
param (
[Parameter(Mandatory = $false)]
[string]$DestinationPath = "C:\temp\all.txt",
[Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
[string]$Path
)
$destinationLastModified = (Get-Item -LiteralPath $DestinationPath).LastWriteTime
$configFiles = Get-ChildItem $files -Recurse
if(#($configFiles.LastWriteTime) -gt $destinationLastModified){
$configFiles |Get-Content |Set-Content -LiteralPath $DestinationPath -Force
}
}
The reason I'm using -LiteralPath in most places above is because $DestinationPath is just that, -Path on the other hand will treat wildcards as expandable which is only appropriate for the $Path parameter value in this function