Powershell: Copy-Item wildcard destination path - powershell

Question

Trying to copy an updated shortcut to a wildcard path. The code works when I run it in a test scenario on the local machine:
$Source1 = "C:\Temp\Updated Shortcut\MyShortcut.lnk"
$destination1 = "C:\Temp\Users\*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\MyShortcut.lnk"
Get-ChildItem -Path $destination1 | ForEach-Object { Copy-Item -Path $Source1 -Destination $_.DirectoryName }
But running it against the production target path does not work:
$Source1 = "C:\Temp\Updated Shortcut\MyShortcut.lnk"
$destination1 = "U:\Users\*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\MyShortcut.lnk"
Get-ChildItem -Path $destination1 | ForEach-Object { Copy-Item -Path $Source1 -Destination $_.DirectoryName }
It will also work if I remove the wildcard and use an actual path:
$Source1 = "C:\Temp\Updated Shortcut\MyShortcut.lnk"
$destination1 = "U:\Users\JohnSmith\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\MyShortcut.lnk"
Get-ChildItem -Path $destination1 | ForEach-Object { Copy-Item -Path $Source1 -Destination $_.DirectoryName }
The U:\Users folder does contain 1181 folders in there (one for each of the 1181 users), so not sure if that may be an issue too??

Answer 1

Just because code can be written on one line or using a pipeline, does not mean that code is easy to debug or maintain.
Break your code down, debug it, add some logging, etc.
$Source1 = "C:\Temp\Updated Shortcut\MyShortcut.lnk"
$destination1 = "U:\Users\*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\MyShortcut.lnk"
$items = Get-ChildItem -Path $destination1
Write-Verbose "Number of items: $($items.Count)" -Verbose
foreach ($item in $items)
{
Write-Verbose "Item: $item" -Verbose
# use -Force here? Does $_ have a DirectoryName property?
#
#Copy-Item -Path $Source1 -Destination $_.DirectoryName
Copy-Item -Path $Source1 -Destination $item -Force -WhatIf
}
My guess is that once you start looking into the diagnostics, you will isolate the issues quickly.