So I'm not sure if this can be accomplished, all of the answers I've seen deal with knowing the exact file name...but here it goes:
I want to search through a directory that has +-2,000 songs in it, but I don't want to have to know the whole file name (because some of them can get long and complicated). Here is an example of what I want:
I know I can display all of the contents of the directory doing this:
Get-ChildItem C:\My\Path\To\Songs\Here
But what I want to do (since that directory contains about 2,000 songs) is search so that I only have to enter a few words from the title and have only those songs that contain those words pop up. For instance:
If the full name of the file is "Everybody Dies Young" and I search for the keyword "Everybody" I want the following to pop up:
Everybody
Everybody Loves Everybody
I Can't Get With Everybody
etc
etc
etc
Is this possible to search keywords in a directory and return all filenames with those keywords? I run Windows 7 if that helps anybody at all...
Use the -Filter parameter
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\My\Path\To\Songs\Here -Recurse -File -Filter *Everybody*
Reference: Get-ChildItem
-Filter
Specifies a filter in the provider's format or language. The value of
this parameter qualifies the Path parameter. The syntax of the filter,
including the use of wildcards, depends on the provider. Filters are
more efficient than other parameters, because the provider applies
them when retrieving the objects, rather than having Windows
PowerShell filter the objects after they are retrieved from the
provider.
Update:
To get just the file paths you can extend it like
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File -Filter *Everybody* | % {$_.FullName}
Or
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File -Filter *Everybody* | Foreach-Object {$_.FullName}
by piping the files to a for each loop and extracting the full path.
if you want a filter more elabored you can do it:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | where {$_.Name -like "*word1*" -and $_.Name -notlike "*word2*"} | select FullName
Related
I am using Beyond Compare and I have gotten it to ouput if there are any differences into a txt file. However, I want to script this in powershell so that if there are no differences in files, the script will continue and do something else. However, I am not sure this is possible. I have looked through Select-String, but unsure if that will be able to do what I am looking for. Attached is what the txt file looks like when there are no differences as well as what it looks like when there are differences.
Is it possible to convert name, size, or modified in the txt file into a variable and then do a condition on whether it is null? Or is there is another way I can do what I am trying to achieve in Powershell? Thanks in advance.
If all you need to know is whether any differences were found, the following should do:
$noDiffs = '' -eq ((Get-Content -Raw report.txt) -split '\r?\n-+\r?\n')[1].Trim()
(Get-Content -Raw report.txt) -split '\r?\n-+\r?\n splits the entire input file by the the divider line (----...) following the table-header line, using a regex (regular expression).
[1] looks a the 2nd element of the resulting array, i.e., whatever comes after the divider line, trims any leading and trailing whitespace, and the result is tested for being the empty string.
With all respect to the question and the answer from #mklement0.
Using Beyond Compare in a PowerShell script is putting the cart before the horse.
There are a lot of cmdlets in PowerShell which would let you easily compare folders (and a lot more) without doing any text scraping.
As using Compare-Object togehter with Get-ChildItem for the given example:
Compare-Object (Get-ChildItem .\Test) (Get-ChildItem .\Test1) -Property Name, Length, LastWriteTime
If you want to do a recursive compare on the relative path, you can do:
Compare-Object (Get-ChildItem .\Test -Recurse -Name) (Get-ChildItem .\Test1 -Recurse -Name)
Note that the -Name parameter will only list relative path strings, if you also want to compare Length and LastWriteTime, You can do:
$TestFolder = 'C:\Test'
$Test1Folder = 'C:\Test1'
$TestFiles = Get-ChildItem $TestFolder -File -Recurse |
Select-Object *,#{N='RelativePath'; E={$_.FullName.SubString($TestFolder.Length)}}
$Test1Files = Get-ChildItem $Test1Folder -File -Recurse |
Select-Object *,#{N='RelativePath'; E={$_.FullName.SubString($Test1Folder.Length)}}
Compare-Object $TestFiles $Test1Files -Property RelativePath,Length,LastWriteTime
I'm attempting to write a powershell script that will search recursively for a file and copy it to another location on a local drive with the date appended to it.
However that file could be in multiple different directories. (ex. c:\users\default\Bookmark.txt, c:\users\profile1\Bookmark.txt, c:\users\profile2\Bookmark.txt...etc.)
To distinguish between the different directories I was thinking of appending the directory name containing the file to the filename along with the date. (ex. filename-directoryName-date)
Here is what I have so far:
get-childitem -path "$env:userprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data" -filter Bookmarks -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Force | copy-item -Destination $env:userprofile\Bookmarks-$(get-date -UFormat %d-%m-%Y)
This works if it only finds 1 copy of the Bookmarks file and it only appends the date.
To figure out the names of the containing folders I used this command.
(get-childitem -path "$env:userprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data" -filter Bookmarks -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Force).Directory.Name
I need to somehow put this two together and so it outputs :
c:(whateverlocation)\Bookmark-DirectoryName-Date
I hope I'm making sense.
Dan,
When you use the Get-ChildItem command (alias gci) it will return to you an array of DirectoryInfo and FileInfo objects, one for each item it finds. If you are looking for files called "Bookmarks" (or bookmark.txt...can't tell from your examples which one you're looking for) then you can use the following command to get you a list of all of them:
[array]$FileList = gci -Recurse -File -Filter "Bookmarks"
The [array] designation is necessary to be sure the object is an array regardless of how many items are returned. The filter can have wildcards if you don't know the exact filename. What that leaves me with is an array object named $FileList containing all of the information about the files. You can read all about the properties and methods available in these objects at this Microsoft help page.
For this task, we'll need the .FullName property, which tells you the full path & name of each item (which can be used as your source) and the .BaseName & .Extension properties, which give you the filename and extension respectively. Using these properties, you can copy each of the files you find to a destination. Putting it all together, you get something like this:
$SourceFolder = "$($env:userprofile)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data"
$DestFolder = '' #Path to Destination Folder
[array]$FileList = gci -Path $SourceFolder -Recurse -File -Filter "Bookmarks"
ForEach ($F in $FileList) {
Copy-Item $F.FullName (Join-Path $DestFolder ($F.Name + 'stuff to add to end of filename' + $F.Extension))
}
In this case, since the files are named 'Bookmarks', the $F.Extension should be blank. If using a more traditional filename, the pattern above will help you fit your changes in between the filename and the extension.
Hope this helps you out. If it does, please accept the answer using the check mark on the left.
If I execute:
Get-ChildItem *.ext -recurse
the output consists of a series of Directory sections followed by one or more columns of info for each matching file separated by said directory sections. Is there something like the Unix find command? In which each matching file name appears on a single line with its full relative path?
Get-Childitem by default outputs a view for format-table defined in a format xml file somewhere.
get-childitem | format-table
get-childitem | format-list *
shows you the actual properties in the objects being output. See also How to list all properties of a PowerShell object . Then you can pick and choose the ones you want. This would give the full pathname:
get-childitem | select fullname
If you want an output to be just a string and not an object:
get-childitem | select -expand fullname
get-childitem | foreach fullname
Resolve-Path with the -Relative switch can be used to display the relative paths of a set of paths. You can collect the full path names (FullName property) from the Get-ChildItem command and use the member access operator . to grab the path values only.
Resolve-Path -Path (Get-ChildItem -Filter *.ext -Recurse).FullName -Relative
Note: The relative paths here only accurately reflect files found within the current directory (Get-ChildItem -Path .), i.e. Get-ChildItem -Path NotCurrentDirectory could have undesirable results.
Get-ChildItem's -Name switch does what you want:
It outputs the relative paths (possibly including subdir. components) of matching files as strings (type [string]).
# Lists file / dir. paths as *relative paths* (strings).
# (relative to the input dir, which is implicitly the current one here).
Get-ChildItem -Filter *.ext -Recurse -Name
Note that I've used -Filter, which significantly speeds up the traversal.
Caveat: As of PowerShell 7.0, -Name suffers from performance problems and behavioral quirks; see these GitHub issues:
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/9014
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/9119
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/9126
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/9122
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/9120
I am having some problem passing the path plus filename to a parser. There are about 90 files of 1 GB each involved in my task. Each of the file is contained in a folder of its own. All of the folders are contained under a parent folder.
Goal: Ideally, I would like to parse 20 files simultaneously for multitasking and continue to the next 20 until all 90 files are done.
This would mean that I would like to spawn some concurrent parsing of 20 files in a batch at any one given time. In carrying out the parsing, I would like to use measure-command to time the work from beginning to finish.
Script I have used:
Get-ChildItem –Path "E:\\OoonaFTP\\input\\Videos3\\" -Filter *.mp4 -recurse | select -expand fullname
Foreach-Object {
Measure-Command { "E:\OoonaFTP\Ooona_x64_ver_2.5.13\OoonaParser.exe -encode -dat -drm $_.FullName" } | Select-Object -Property TotalSeconds
}
===============================
I have this working batch script with a for statement but doing each iteration one after another. This is not what is the ideal case though. I would really like to accomplish this in PowerShell and with simultaneous tasks.
Could someone please suggest some ways by which I could accomplish this?
Thank you very much!
Thanks for the various suggestions. I'm curious that some of them lead to empty output in my Powershell (PSVersion: 5.1.18362.145).
I tried a number of these and, inspired by some of them, found the best answer for my case at the moment:
Get-ChildItem *.ext -recurse | Select-Object -property fullname
(When I made the window wide enough I got all the info I needed; in general I suppose I might need to do more to get the formatting I want.)
For example, I want the contents of the "Last" folder in the structure below. The various path structures are identical except for the first two levels.
C:\zyx-wvu\abc\Level3\Last
C:\tsr-qpo\def\Level3\Last
C:\nml-kji\ghi\Level3\Last
In PowerShell I get close with:
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\*-*\*
...but it doesn't return any results (as in it never finishes) when I try:
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\*-*\*\Level3
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\*-*\*
will only show you what's in the second layer behind anything with a hyphen in c:\
aka it will show
c:\1-2\alpha
c:\1-5\beta
etc...
What you want is
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\*-*\*\*
or more likely you want
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\*-*\* -recurse
if you want to find paths with the SAME name... you could group them together, and pull out anything with more than one finding... you didn't ask very specifically what you wanted, but here's some ideas.
get-childitem -Path c:\*-*\*\* | group-object -property basename | where count -gt 1 | select -expand group
I am looking for a way to count files from many sub-folders but the tricky part is that i want to filter them by part of their names. To be more specific, all files have a date at the middle of their names. If I want to just count the files within a specific folder I use this:
dir * |%{$_.Name.SubString(7,8)} | group |select name,count|ft -auto
And works like a charm. The problem lies that it cannot see more than one folder. Also a second problem is that in the result, I want to see the path name of the grouped counts. I am also testing this:
dir -recurse | ?{ $_.PSIsContainer } | %{ Write-Host $_.FullName (dir $_.FullName | Measure-Object).Count }
but I cannot implement the date filter from inside the name in this functions. I am also attaching an example of how is the format and how I would like the results.
Any help?
I am looking for a way to count files from many sub-folders but the tricky part is that I want to filter them by part of their names. To be more specific, all files have a date at the middle of their names.
It is not 100% clear to me, if you really want to filter them or to group them before counting, so I'll show both.
Assuming that this middle of their names is, e.g., delimited by _ this can be achieved the following way:
# C:/temp/testFolder/myName_123_folder/text.txt
Get-ChildItem * -Recurse |
Select-Object -Property Name, #{Name = "CustomDate"; Expression = {$_.Name.Split("_")[1]}} |
#This is how you would _filter_
#Where-Object {$_.Custom -eq "123"} |
Group-Object -Property CustomDate |
Select-Object Name, Count
Don't forget to check if the file name matches this pattern, before splitting. This can be done with a Select-Object statement between gci and 1. select, which checks the file name for your specific pattern.
Your question shows also that you wanted to filter for only directories:
dir -recurse | ?{ $_.PSIsContainer } | %{ #[...]
Which is not very efficient.
From the Docs of Get-ChildItem:
-Directory
Gets directories (folders).
To get only directories, use the -Directory parameter and omit the -File parameter. To exclude directories, use the -File parameter and omit the -Directory parameter, or use the -Attributes parameter.
This means, the preferred way to search only for Directories is:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory | % { #[...]