CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell
Norrin Rad
Norrin Rad

Reputation: 991

Remove first character from list of names and rename

I have a list of users whose names start with the old naming convention which is first character and surname i.e ASmith, BJones, CGrayson etc and I need to remove the first character, so that I'm just left with surname, which I will then query AD with to extract first and lastname, however I was unable to rename the list. I tried this code, but can't see where I'm going wrong.

$name = get-content c:\tempfiles\list.txt
foreach ($name in $names) 
{
  $th = $name.substring(1);
  rename-item $name -newname $th
} | export-csv C:\TempFiles\New.csv

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2159

Answers (1)

Mark Wragg
Mark Wragg

Reputation: 23415

There's a typo in the first line of your code (you want the collection of names to go in to $names and then analyze each one in to the variable $name as part of your loop):

$names = get-content c:\tempfiles\list.txt

However in order for ForEach to support the pipeline you need to use ForEach-Object instead so the next section should be:

$names | ForEach-Object {
  $th = $_.substring(1);
  write-output $th
} | Set-content c:\tempfiles\newfile.txt

You also don't need to use Rename-Item, that's for renaming a file or other object retrieved via a namespace provider. Just output the new string with write-output and then use the pipeline to output it to a new text file.

If you want the result to go to a CSV file, and you want that file to also contain the old name, you could do something like this:

$names | ForEach-Object {

    $Properties = [ordered]@{
        'oldname' = $_
        'newname' = $_.substring(1)
    }

    New-Object -Property $Properties -TypeName PSCustomObject

} | export-csv New.csv -NoTypeInformation

In this example we build a hashtable that has two properties (oldname and newname) and then create an object that has those properties which is then passed through the pipeline to export-csv.

Upvotes: 2

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