Event 1 for the PowerShell Scripting Games 2013 has closed, here are a few learning points I picked up on from entries submitted.
1) Get-ChildItem -Recurse
When you need to retrieve files from paths with subfolders the Recurse parameter of Get-ChildItem makes this really easy. For instance
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Application\Log -Filter *.log -Recurse
is a really easy way to return everything below C:\Application\Log. In the specific instance of this event, this is OK because you only have three subfolders, but potentially there could be a lot more and some of them might not be relevant.
So a better way to do this might be to use wildcards in your path. For instance here we know that all of the subfolders that we are interested in contain the string ‘app’ so we could use something like the below:
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Application\Log\*app*\*.log
Note you can use the * wildcard not only for part of the filename, but also the directory and you can combine multiple wildcards.
2) Copy-Item followed by Remove-Item
The goal of the event is to archive files from the expensive storage to cheaper, archived storage. Some examples used a two-step process to do this with:
Copy-Item..... Remove-Item.....
(and some did not even include the Remove-Item, so the files are duplicated) No need to do that, you can use Move-Item to make it a one step process.
3) Maintaining the Folder Structure at the Destination
Make sure you read all of the requirements for the event. One of which was to maintain the folder structure at the destination archive. So something like the following will simply end up with all of the log files in one unmanageable folder.
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Application\Log\*app*\*.log -file | Move-Item -Destination C:\Archive
Since we are not using the Recurse parameter in the initial query, an attempt to move the file will fail because the path does not exist. Instead we can do something similar to the touch command in Unix to first create an empty file, then overwrite it with the file move.
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Application\Log\*app*\*.log | ForEach-Object {New-Item -ItemType File -Path "C:\Archive\$($_.Directory.Name)\$($_.Name)" -Force; Move-Item $_ -Destination "C:\Archive\$($_.Directory.Name)" -Force}
Looking forward to seeing entries for the next event. Remember you can still join in and there are plenty of prizes to be won!
