Searching for files in powershell - powershell

Question

I've scoured all of the internet for this answer. Maybe it's right here, but alas, I'm out of time and we're on a time schedule from the wonderful boys over in legal.
We have some files which need to be retrieved based on particular names which appear in the directory path.
The person who stored and saved all of these files kept the same naming convention throughout. She's pretty awesome and a++ to her.
The file structure is as below:
Animals
-Dogs
-Folders With Breeds of Dogs
-<Breed of Dog>_MA_etc.pdf
-Cats
-Folders with Breeds of Cats
-<Breed of Cat>_MA_etc.pdf
-ETC
-etc
-etc
The person who saved the files was meticulous about file structure and naming convention, so you can expect c:\animals\dogs\GSD\GSD_MA.PDF or something like that.
While the original author was rather consistent, human error has occured so what I'm trying to do is look for "close enough", basically.
We might have:
Client Agreements\Netflix\files
Master Agreements\Netflix,Inc\files
Rental Agreements\Netflix\files
What I want to do is grab the file structure of all of those and move them to my "E:\sorted" directory maintaining the file structure it has.
So stepping way from animals, we've got a client list from legal with names they're interested. If I look for name:name, i get 27 results. So far not good.
I've tried partial and I get zero results. So here's my terrible code below. Maybe you can make fun of me and show me where I went wrong.
$a = Import-CSV C:\scripts\Clients.csv
$a = #($a.Client)
#$a = $a | %{ $_.SubString(0,6) }
$c = Get-ChildItem E:\Legal\ -include ($a) -recurse # | Where-Object {($_ -match $a)}
ForEach($file in $c){
$dest = Split-Path -path $file.FullName -Parent | Split-path -NoQualifier
#Copy-Item -path $file -recurse -Destination "e:\sorted\11\$dest" -force -Verbose
}

Answer 1

I expect that there is a more PowerShell-ish way to do it, but I used a more procedural-type approach.
Using a HashSet, I create a set of directories which need to be copied. A HashSet has only one of an entry, so if it contains "C:\A\B", then adding "C:\A\B" again will not add another entry.
The .contains method is the .NET one, not the PS one, and similarly for .replace.
$src = "C:\temp\a"
$dest = "F:\temp\b"
$CsvFile = Join-Path -Path $src -ChildPath "findthese.csv"
$sought = (Import-Csv $CsvFile).Client
$dirs = Get-ChildItem -Path $src -Directory -Recurse
$set = New-Object System.Collections.Generic.HashSet[string]
# get the directories with a client name in the path anywhere
foreach($dir in $dirs) {
foreach($client in $sought) {
if ($dir.FullName.contains($client)) {
$temp = $set.Add($dir.FullName)
}
}
}
# copy the selected directory structures to the destination
foreach($dir in $set) {
Copy-Item -path $dir -Destination $dir.replace($src, $dest) -Recurse -WhatIf
}
I left the -WhatIf in there so you can quickly check it's going to do the right thing.

Answer 2

If the names in $a don't exactly match the names of files, using that as input to the include parameter won't help you find just those files you want.
I've got a file named clients.csv with the follwong
client,gender,fun
fred,m,y
barney,m,y
wilma,f,y
navneet,n,y
kumar,f,y
konda,m,y
In my current directory, I've got a directory named clients with the following contents:
C:
├───clients
├───losers
│ barney_loser.txt
│ kumar_loser.txt
│
└───winners
fred_winner.txt
konda_winner.txt
wilma_winner.txt
Case-1:
ls .\clients\ -Filter *.txt -Recurse
Returns all the text files.
Case-2:
$people = import-csv -path .\people.csv
$clients = $people.client
ls .\clients\ -Filter *.txt -Recurse -Include $clients
Returns me nothing.
Case-3:
$people = import-csv -path .\people.csv
$clients = $people.client
$clients += 'kumar_loser.txt'
ls .\clients\ -Filter *.txt -Recurse -Include $clients
Returns me one record for "kumar_loser.txt".
I'm asserting the pattern in your list ($a) don't match the file names.
If I wanted to fix that in my example, I could do something like this...
$people = import-csv -path .\people.csv
$clients = $people.client
for($i = 0; $i -lt $clients.length; $i++) {
$clients[$i] = '*{0}*' -f $clients[$i]
}
ls .\clients\ -Filter *.txt -Recurse -Include $clients
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Thanks for the help guys.
I took a less scripty approach and procedural approach, as suggested above. Here's the code I used that mostly worked, a colleague and I went through and verified the results and some outlier files. I had to double check the errors that popped up and found a few more files that I wanted. Wasn't perfect, but definitely cut down looking through 700 folders and 3000 files. Include is great but filter is what I really wanted. Furthermore, Include doesn't like index values and Filter Especially doesn't, so I had to save it to a variable and filter by that with a * wildcard which did work.
Here's what I did:
$people = Import-CSV C:\scripts\HelenClients.csv
$clients = $people.Client| %{$_.SubString(0,5)}
for($i=0; $i -lt $clients.Length; $i++){
$name = $clients[$i]
Write-Host "Searching for $name"
$file = Get-ChildItem 'E:\Legal\' -Include "$name*" -recurse
if($file -ne $null){
$dest = Split-Path -path $file -Parent
$dest1 = $dest | Split-Path -NoQualifier
$from = $dest[0]
$to = $dest1[0]
$too = $file.BaseName[0]
Copy-Item $file -Destination e:\sorted\16\$to\$too\ -force -Verbose
}
else{
Write-Output "No results found"
}
}
I found when you store the results into a variable, if there's more than one, it'll list all of the locations and names, etc. Not pretty. See below:
PS C:\Users\me> $ff
Directory: E:\ParentDir\subfolder\redacted
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
-a---- 6/4/2018 1:47 PM 50485 redacted.docx
-a---- 6/4/2018 1:47 PM 155579 redacted.pdf
PS C:\Users\me> $ff.Basename
Redacted Basename 0
Redacted Basename 1
PS C:\Users\me> $ff.BaseName[0]
Redacted Basename 0
So I just wanted the first indexed value. I also wanted to maintain the file structure without copying everything over, so I used split-path to kind of take it apart. It's very hodgepodge and not pretty to look at, but it works.