Places to learn Powershell?

[Makhaira]

Just wondering what the recommendations were for online places to learn powershell? I have a specific task I'm trying to achieve around iterating through all subfolders (only one level), renaming each file with a certain extension to its current name plus subfolder name, then moving the resultant file into the root directory. Up for teaching myself but there seems to be a lot of crap online so was wondering if there were any known good places to learn.

Cheers.

 

[HungryHippos]

This should do what you want just run in a test method first, i.e. against a folder you've added with some files for testing.

This only goes 1 level deep.

Remove -WhatIf on the Move-Item command if it looks OK etc, otherwise it will just output what it would do. You may need to swap -WhatIf for -Confirm:$False

#Root Folder
$RootFolderPath = "C:\RootFolder\"
$RootFolderDirs = gci $RootFolderPath -Directory

#Loop SubFolders of RootFolder
foreach ($SubFolder in $RootFolderDirs)
{
    Write-Host $SubFolder.FullName
  
    #Get Files in current RootFolder
    $SubFolderFiles = gci $SubFolder.FullName -File
  
    #Loop Files
    foreach ($File in $SubFolderFiles)
    {
        #Move File. Format is RootFolderPath\SubFolderName_FileName.ext
        $NewPath = $RootFolderPath + "$($SubFolder.Name)_$($File.Name)"
        Move-Item -Path $File.FullName -Destination $NewPath -WhatIf
    }
}

 

[KompuKare]

Not very helpful, but part of the reason Powershell is so confusing IMO is that it tries to do and be too many things:
Run DOS batch files? No problem.
Run Powershell native stuff? No problem.
Tab into the full .NET Framework? No problem.
etc.
Then go some things its own way like -eq, -gt, -lt, and similar things when most programmings languages whether C inspired or from a Basic/Pascal background get way with = (or == and even === in the case of some C syntax inspired ones) and > and < etc.
And the strings where ' and " mean different things.
But generally you should do this kind of thing using Powershell native cmdlets, so start with Get-ChildItem and work from there.

And it goes without saying that while move and rename aren't as destructive as delete, you should still test this all out using some test folder!

EDIT: never mind the Get-ChildItem, @HungryHippos code is far more readable!

 

[Josh]

Powershell in a month of lunches, I didn’t complete it but it gave me the grounding so needed to use it to an okay level.

Oh and “-whatif” is your friend

 

[HungryHippos]

EDIT: never mind the Get-ChildItem, @HungryHippos code is far more readable!

gci is shorthand for Get-ChildItem.

You can use shorthands in places, some are more useful/memorable than others.

For example: $Variable | ? {$_.Property -eq "Thing"}

? replaces Where-Object in this case

I use these a fair bit as well:

$Variable | fl
$Variable | ft -a
$Variable | Out-Gridview

fl = format list
ft -a = autoformat table
Out-Gridview = send the output to a gridview object so I can see the data bit better without Export-Csv

 

[Zefan]

Powershell in a month of lunches, I didn’t complete it but it gave me the grounding so needed to use it to an okay level.

Oh and “-whatif” is your friend

This. Also just muck about with chatgpt and customise the very nearly working thing it'll give you.

 

[Makhaira]

@HungryHippos I never expected someone to just give me the answer, thank you! Worked a charm!

Thanks to everyone else for your responses too.

 

[OspreyO]

Must get back to it myself. Did a 5 day intensive course but it was (against my wishes) crammed in the middle of two other courses. Then I struggled to get admin rights on the infrastructure I was trying to use PS on, and was distracted with other work so I gave up.