CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell
BeniaminoBaggins
BeniaminoBaggins

Reputation: 12433

Locate file in folder further down the hierarchy

I need to locate a .exe file and run it, only knowing the directory which is a few levels higher than the .exe file

EG If I have this folder structure:

test\bin\Debug\netcoreapp1.0\win7-x64\program.exe

and I only know the test folder, I need to get the path to program.exe, without knowing the name of the .exe file either (but there is only one .exe file).

So something like:

gcm *.exe test

Where test is the source folder to look in.

How do I do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 51

Answers (2)

Sophie Swett
Sophie Swett

Reputation: 3390

This sounds like what you're looking for:

$path = 'test'
$program = Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Filter *.exe -Recurse
& $program.FullName

The & operator there is the call operator; it can run an executable given the full path to it.

Upvotes: 1

Ansgar Wiechers
Ansgar Wiechers

Reputation: 200293

gcm is an alias for Get-Command. You're looking for gci (Get-ChildItem). Use the parameter -Recurse to recurse into subfolders and -Filter to filter for files with a particular extension:

Get-ChildItem test -Filter *.exe -Recurse

Note that, as @Guvante pointed out, this might return more than one executable (or even none at all), so you need to decide how you want to handle all these cases (run all executables, the first, the last, none, fail with an error, fail silently, ...).

Once you have a matching file you can run it for instance via the call operator:

$exe = Get-ChildItem ... | Select-Object -First 1 -Expand FullName
& $exe

Upvotes: 1

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