CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell
Bruce
Bruce

Reputation: 81

Powershell concatenating text to a variable

My source files all reside in one folder whose path is contained in a variable named $template. I need to specify the exact filename as each file goes to a different destination.

My goal is to merely concatenate the filename to the variable.

Example:

$template = "D:\source\templatefiles\"

Filename1 is: "graphic-183.jpg"

I have tried:

Join-Path $template graphic-183.jpg

Issuing this at the cli appears to do what I want.

But now, how do I reference this concatenated file path short of creating a new variable for each file? It isn't as simple as for-nexting my way through a list as depending on the filename that determines where the file goes.

I am toying with case else, elseIf, but surely it isn't this hard.

The bottom line is, I just want to prefix the folder path to each filename and hard code the destination as it will always be the same each time the script is run.

edit

I just edited this as I forgot to mention how I am trying to use this.

In my script I intend to have lines like:

Copy-Item -Path $template filename.ext -Destination $destfolder

It's the highlighted part above that I am trying to join $template to the filename.

Thanks for any advice.

-= Bruce D. Meyer

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4608

Answers (2)

Nacht
Nacht

Reputation: 3494

maybe this is what you want?

you can call cmdlets in place, using parentheses, like so:

Copy-Item -Path (Join-Path $template filename.ext) -Destination $destfolder

this causes PowerShell to go from "argument mode" to "expression mode" - i.e., it returns the output of the Join-Path cmdlet as an expression.

and yes, David's and Ansgar's suggestions are also helpful - try this to get full paths only:

(get-childitem $template) | select fullname

Upvotes: 4

Ansgar Wiechers
Ansgar Wiechers

Reputation: 200483

You could build the path like this:

$template = "D:\source\templatefiles\"
Copy-Item -Path "${template}filename.ext" ...

However, I think David's suggestion might be a better solution for your problem. You could map filenames to destination folders with a hash table and do something like this:

$locations = @{
  "foo" = "C:\some",
  "bar" = "C:\other",
  ...
}

Get-ChildItem $template | % { Copy-Item $_ $location[$_.Name] }

Upvotes: 1

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