CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellpowershell-4.0powershell-ise
VereMyth
VereMyth

Reputation: 13

Writing a PowerShell script to copy directory and its contents to all users documents folder

First, this is my first REAL question on stack-overflow so here we go:

I am trying to use Get-ChildItem and Copy-Item to copy a directory and its contents to every user-profile that may be on a PC without knowing how many users or their usernames. However, I have run into an illegal character issue whenever I run the script or other variations of what I think are the same way to achieve the result. I think it is because of the wildcard but I do not know how I should circumvent that.

For Example: Testing the Wildcard:

Get-ChildItem 'C:Users\*\'

I can see all the users and Power-shell Documentation from Microsoft states using the * should allow it so include all items in that folder. But whenever I extend the path to lets say:

Copy-Item 'D:\Custom Office Templates' -Recurse -Destination 'C:\Users\*\Documents\' -Force

I get an "Illegal Characters in path error." If I replace that * with an actual username to correct the path I get what I want for a single user. The same thing happens when trying to use.

ForEach-Object {Copy-Item -Path 'D:\Custom Office Templates' -Destination 'C:\users\*\Documents\Custom Office Templates' -Force -Recurse}

Thanks you for any assistance given :).

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2047

Answers (1)

Santiago Squarzon
Santiago Squarzon

Reputation: 61128

-Destination is read as a literal path, does not understand about wildcards. What you can do is combine what you already have with Get-ChildItem using a wildcard on -Path with a delay-bind script block on -Destination:

$source = 'D:\Custom Office Templates'
Get-ChildItem 'C:Users\*\' -Directory |
    Copy-Item -LiteralPath $source -Recurse -Destination {
        Join-Path $_.FullName 'Documents\Custom Office Templates'
    }

Upvotes: 0

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