Powershell Move Files to a specific folder

Question

I need to move files, which satisfy specific conditions, from folder A to a specific subfolder in folder B.

The conditions are:

• Group the files that contain .exe and take the two with the highest number.

• After the number take the string between the first two hyphen characters (-). The custom-string

• Move these files in the folder B\win(custom-string), if win folder does not exist create it, the same goes for the custom-string folder.

So for example in the image below we would take the files CICone NT Setup 0.25.5-develop-build.0.exe and CICone NT Setup 0.25.5-develop-build.0.exe.blockmap and move them to a folder B\win\develop\, here the develop is the name of the folder (the string between the two first hyphen characters).

---

Here is the solution:

$winFiles = get-childitem | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "*.exe*"} | Sort-Object -Descending -Property Name | Select-Object -First 2

ForEach ($file in $winFiles){ 
$EnvironmentSubstring = $file.Name.Split('-')[1]

if(!(Test-Path ..\B\win)){

    New-Item -Path ..\B\win -ItemType Directory -Force | Out-Null

    if(!(Test-Path ..\B\win\$EnvironmentSubstring)){
    New-Item -Path ..\B\win\$EnvironmentSubstring -ItemType Directory -Force | Out-Null
    }
}

Move-Item -Path $file.Name -Destination ..\B\win\$EnvironmentSubstring\ -Force
}

Answer 1

I mocked up a directory with these files:

Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name                                             
----                -------------         ------ ----                                             
-a----        4/25/2018  11:07 AM              3 CICone NT Setup 0.25.5-dev-build.exe             
-a----        4/25/2018  11:07 AM              3 CICone NT Setup 0.25.4-UAT-build.exe             
-a----        4/25/2018  11:07 AM              3 CICone NT Setup 0.25.3-UAT-build.exe             
-a----        4/25/2018  11:07 AM              3 CICone NT Setup 0.25.3-dev-build.exe             

Your first request was finding the two highest numbered .exe files in this path, that's easy.

>get-childitem *.exe | Sort-Object -Descending -Property Name | Select-Object -First 2

Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name                                             
----                -------------         ------ ----                                             
-a----        4/25/2018  11:07 AM              3 CICone NT Setup 0.25.5-dev-build.exe             
-a----        4/25/2018  11:07 AM              3 CICone NT Setup 0.25.4-UAT-build.exe    

The next step is to store this list of files in a variable called $files like so.

>$files = get-childitem *.exe | Sort-Object -Descending -Property Name | Select-Object -First 2

Now, to iterate through them and parse out the environment.

PowerShell is an object based scripting language, which allows us to select properties of objects (in this case the .Name property of each file) and then act on those properties by calling methods on them. We can use the .Split() method to break a string up on each instance of a character. For instance, if we want to split our files on the - char, we can do so like this, with the following output:

>$file.Name.Split('-')
CICone NT Setup 0.25.4
dev
build.exe

We can then select the second one in the list using Index notation like the the following (0 = first position, 1 = second position, and so on)

>$file.Name.Split('-')[1]
dev

Baking all of these concepts together into a script to get you started:

$files = get-childitem *.exe | Sort-Object -Descending -Property Name | Select-Object -First 2

ForEach ($file in $files){ 
    $EnvironmentSubstring = $file.Name.Split('-')[1]
    "this file $($file.Name) should go to .\$EnvironmentSubstring\"
}

Running that will give the following output:

this file CICone NT Setup 0.25.5-dev-build.exe should go to .\dev\
this file CICone NT Setup 0.25.4-UAT-build.exe should go to .\UAT\

From here, you just need to figure out which command to use to copy a file. PowerShell uses a Verb-Noun naming convention, so I'll give you a hint that you will need to learn how to use Copy-Item. You can run Get-Help Copy-Item -Examples to see detailed examples on how to use each cmdlet in PowerShell by running that from the prompt.