Extract the end of every lines from multiple files

Question

I have several txt files distributed in several sub-folders. This is what a file looks like:

Data file. version 01.10.

1
8
*
DAT\Trep\Typ10
DAT\Trep\Typ12
DAT\Trep\Typ13

what I would like to do is to extract only the part after the last "\" in order to get something like this:

Typ10 FileName.txt Path
Typ12 FileName.txt Path
Typ13 FileName.txt Path
...

I tried the following

Get-ChildItem -Path 'D:\MyData\*.txt' -Recurse | ForEach-Object {Write-Output $_; $data=Get-Content $_}
$data = $data -replace '.*\\'
$data

it works well for a single file but not with several (-recurse). Being a powershell beginner I can't figure out how to improve my script.

I also tried to add this to get the result shown above in my post, but that doesn't work either.

Select-Object -Property @{Name = 'Result list'; Expression = { $data }}, Filename, Path

Thanks in advance for your kind help

Answer 1

Use Select-String:

Get-ChildItem -Path D:\MyData\*.txt -Recurse -File |
  Select-String '^.+\\(.+)' | 
  ForEach-Object { 
    [pscustomobect] @{ 
      Result = $_.Matches.Groups[1].Value
      FileName = $_.FileName 
      Path = $_.Path
    } 
  }

As for your desire to exclude certain folders during recursive traversal:

• Unfortunately, Get-ChildItem -Exclude only excludes the matching folders themselves, not also their content. There are two relevant feature requests to potentially overcome this limitation in the future:

  • GitHub issue #4126 asks for path patterns to be supported too in the future.
  • GitHub issue #15159 proposes a new subtree-exclusion parameter, such as
    -ExcludeRecursive.

• For now, a different approach with post-filtering based on Where-Object is required, using folder names Folder1 and Folder2 as examples:

Get-ChildItem -Path D:\MyData\*.txt -Recurse |
  Where-Object FullName -NotLike *\Folder1\* |
  Where-Object FullName -NotLike *\Folder2\* |
  Select-String '^.+\\(.+)' | 
  ForEach-Object { 
    [pscustomobect] @{ 
      Result = $_.Matches.Groups[1].Value
      FileName = $_.FileName 
      Path = $_.Path
    } 
  }

For a more flexible, cross-platform approach based on regex matching (which is invariably more complex), see the bottom section of this answer.