Powershell - Sorting and selecting files in foreach loop - powershell

Question

I'm trying to create a script that will find the most recent build_info files from multiple install locations in a server's directory, select the "version: " text from each file, and compare them to see if they're all the same (which is what we hope for), or if certain install locations have different versions. As a bonus, it would also be nice to have each path's install version have its own variable so that if I have to output any differences, I can say which specific paths have which versions. For example, if something is installed in Path1, Path2, and Path3, I want to be able to say, "all paths are on version 3.5," or "Path1 is version 1.2, Path2 is version 3.5, Path3 is version 4.8."
Here's a neater list of what I'm trying to do:
Loop through folders in a directory.
For each folder, sort the txt files with a specific name in that path by Creation Date descending and select the most recent.
Once it has the most recent files from each path, Select-String a specific phrase from each of them. Specifically, "version: ".
Compare the version from each path and see if all are the same or there are differences, then output the result.
This is what I've been able to write so far:
$Directory = dir D:\Directory\Path* | ?{$_.PSISContainer};
$Version = #();
foreach ($d in $Directory) {
$Version = (Select-String -Path D:\Directory\Path*\build_info_v12.txt -Pattern "Version: " | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Line) -replace "Version: ";
}
if (#($Version | Select -Unique).Count -eq 1) {
Write-Host 'The middle tiers are all on version' ($Version | Select -Unique);
}
else {
Write-Host 'One or more middle tiers has a different version.';
}
I've had to hard code in the most recent build_info files because I'm not sure how to incorporate the sorting aspect into this. I'm also not sure how to effectively assign each path's result to a variable and output them if there are differences. This is what I've been messing around with as far as the sorting aspect, but I don't know how to incorporate it and I'm not even sure if it's the right way to approach this:
$Recent = Get-ChildItem -Path D:\Directory\Path*\build_info*.txt | Sort-Object CreationTime -Descending | Select-Object -Index 0;

Answer 1

You can use Sort-Object and Select-Object to determine the most recent file. Here is a function that you can give a collection of files to and it will return the most recent one:
function Get-MostRecentFile{
param(
$fileList
)
$mostRecent = $fileList | Sort-Object LastWriteTime | Select-Object -Last 1
$mostRecent
}

Answer 2

Here is one possible solution:
Get-ChildItem "D:\Directory\Path" -Include "build_info*.txt" -File -Recurse |
Group-Object -Property DirectoryName |
ForEach-Object {
$_.Group |
Sort-Object LastWriteTime -Descending |
Select-Object -First 1 |
ForEach-Object {
New-Object -TypeName PsCustomObject |
Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name Directory -Value $_.DirectoryName -PassThru |
Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name FileName -Value $_.Name -PassThru |
Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name MaxVersion -Value ((Select-String -Path $_.FullName -Pattern "Version: ").Line.Replace("Version: ","")) -PassThru
}
}
This will produce a collection of objects, one for each directory in the tree, with properties for the directory name, most recent version and the file we found the version number in. You can pipe these to further cmdlets for filtering, etc.