CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell
Ben McCormack
Ben McCormack

Reputation: 33078

Powershell implementation to pipe array into command

I'm using the following Powershell command to copy one user's Mercurial.ini file into another user's profile:

> copy $env:USERPROFILE\..\benm\Mercurial.ini $env:USERPROFILE\..\alex\Mercurial.ini

That works well. However, I'd like to write it in such as way so that I can do something like the following, specifying the users up front and piping them in to the copy command:

> "benm","alex" | copy "$env:UserProfile\..\$_[0]\Mercurial.ini" "$env:UserProfile\..\$_[1]\Mercurial.ini"

However, the above doesn't work. Is there an elegant way to achieve what I'm trying to do?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3515

Answers (1)

mjolinor
mjolinor

Reputation: 68243

Something like this?

,("benm","alex") | 
foreach {copy "$env:UserProfile\..\$($_[0])\Mercurial.ini" "$env:UserProfile\..\$($_[1])\Mercurial.ini"}

The ,("benm","alex") syntax makes the input from the pipeline a 2D array

 PS C:\> $x = ,("benm","alex")
 PS C:\> $x[0]
 benm
 alex
 PS C:\> $x[0][0]
 benm
 PS C:\> $x[0][1]
 alex

The Powershell pipeline will automatically "unroll" arrays and collections into a stream of objects, but only one level deep for nested arrays. By making it a 2D array, it "unrolls" the first level, and passes the nested array through the pipelile intact.

Upvotes: 3

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