Powershell For FileSystem For administrators it is important know commands related to file system. Once administrator know about his day to day he need to work on it. Most of us have started their career with playing around file system. Even if we’re working with server applications such as SQL or Exchange Server, as everything thing is built on files, we still need to interact with the file system. We will cover here most of the common administrative tasks regarding the file system.

Let’s see lists the cmdlets that can be used to work with file system also we will see the example. Although names are self explanatory lets see description about it.

• New-Item: With this command you can creates a new file or folder or item.
• Clear-Item: With this command you can delete the contents inside the file item, without deleting the item.
• Copy-Item: This copies an item from one path to another.
• Move-Item: Moves an item from one location (Delete from older location) to another.
• Invoke-Item: Performs the default action on the specified item.
• Remove-Item: Deletes the specified file or folder or item.
• Rename-Item: Renames an file or folder or item.
• Set-Item: Changes the value of an item to the value specified in the command.
• Get-ChildItem: cmdlet gets the items in one or more specified locations. If the item is a container, Get-ChildItem gets the items inside the container, known as child items.
• Get-Item: Gets the item at the specified location.
• Add-Content: One use of the Add-Content cmdlet is to append data to a text file.

Powershell Create File

# Using PowerShell commnads to create a new file
PS>$Location = "C:\test"
PS>New-Item -Path $Location -Name "FirstCreateFile.txt" -ItemType File -Force

Copy File

The Copy-Item cmdlet can be used to copy one or more files or folders from one location, identified by the -Path parameter, to the location specified by the -Destination option.

# Here I define the folders and the extensions to look at.
$folder1 = ls "C:\powershell-scripts\from\" -recurse -include "*.pdf"
$destinationfolder = "C:\powershell-scripts\to\"
Copy-Item -Path $folder1 -Destination $destinationfolder

Read and Rename File

At its most basic, Get-ChildItem can be used simply by providing a path, either through the pipeline, using the -Path parameter, or immediately following the cmdlet name. In order to tune the response returned by Get-ChildItem it is key to take a look at some of the parameters made available by the cmdlet.

PS> Get-Content c:\powershell-scripts\test.txt
 
PS> Rename-Item c:\scripts\test.txt new_name.txt

List the file files

# PowerShell script to list the DLL files under the system32 folder
$Dir = get-childitem C:\windows\system32 
$List = $Dir | where {$_.extension -eq ".dll"}
$List