CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellcopypasteoverwrite
Iggy Castillo
Iggy Castillo

Reputation: 75

In Powershell, how do I copy/paste a file, if file already exists, to roll the new copy of the file?

I am running a powershell script, with the following

Copy-Item -Path c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.config -Destination c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.orig

If the machine.orig already exists, how can i make it copy it to machine.orig1, and if that already exists, machine.orgin2?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1543

Answers (2)

Gene Laisne
Gene Laisne

Reputation: 120

If I may make a suggestion. Personally, I like the idea of a date/time stamp on the file rather than an incremental number. This way you know when the file was backed up, and you're far less likely to run into confusion over the file. Plus the script code is simpler.

Hope this helps.

$TimeStamp = get-date -f "MMddyyyyHHmmss"
$SourceFile = Dir c:\folder\file.txt
$DestinationFile = "{0}\{1}_{2}.{3}" -f $SourceFile.DirectoryName, $SourceFile.BaseName, $TimeStamp, $SourceFile.Extension
copy-Item $sourcefile $DestinationFile

Upvotes: 2

Gajendra D Ambi
Gajendra D Ambi

Reputation: 4233

#let us first define the destination path
$path = "R:\WorkindDirectory"
#name of the file
$file = "machine.orgin"
#let us list the number of the files which are similar to the $file that you are trying to create
$list = Get-ChildItem $path | select name | where name -match $file
#let us count the number of files which match the name $file
$a = ($list.name).count
#if such count of the files matching $file is less than 0 (which means such file dont exist)
if ($a -lt 1) 
{
New-Item -Path $path -ItemType file -Name machine.orgin
}
#if such count of the files matching $file is greater than 0 (which means such/similar file exists)
if ($a -gt 0) 
{
$file = $file+$a
New-Item -Path $path -ItemType file -Name $file
}

Note: This works assuming that the names of the files are in series. Let us say using this script you create machine.orgin

machine.orgin1

machine.orgin2

machine.orgin3

and later delete machine.orgin2 and re run the same script then it won't work. Here i have given an example where i have tried to create a new file and you can safely modify the same to copy such file using copy-item instead of new-item

Upvotes: 0

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