Powershell concatenating text to a variable

Question

My source files all reside in one folder whose path is contained in a variable named $template. I need to specify the exact filename as each file goes to a different destination.

My goal is to merely concatenate the filename to the variable.

Example:

$template = "D:\source\templatefiles\"

Filename1 is: "graphic-183.jpg"

I have tried:

Join-Path $template graphic-183.jpg

Issuing this at the cli appears to do what I want.

But now, how do I reference this concatenated file path short of creating a new variable for each file? It isn't as simple as for-nexting my way through a list as depending on the filename that determines where the file goes.

I am toying with case else, elseIf, but surely it isn't this hard.

The bottom line is, I just want to prefix the folder path to each filename and hard code the destination as it will always be the same each time the script is run.

edit

I just edited this as I forgot to mention how I am trying to use this.

In my script I intend to have lines like:

Copy-Item -Path $template filename.ext -Destination $destfolder

It's the highlighted part above that I am trying to join $template to the filename.

Thanks for any advice.

-= Bruce D. Meyer

Can't you just call $myFiles = Get-ChildItem $template? Then all of the files in $template will be stored in the array $myFiles. Or am I missing something? — David
– David, Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 22:11
Nope. Your not missing a thing. It's all me. Not a tremendous amount of contiguous experience. I seem to only have the pleasure of writing scripts only when I need them, which isn't real often. I tried to google this, but just couldn't find exactly what I needed. Between the three answers provided here, I'm good now. Now, If I can figure out how this voting thing works. The other two are listed as answers, and your reply David, looks like it is a comment or something. Thank you all three. — Bruce
– Bruce, Commented Nov 16, 2012 at 21:36

Nacht · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-14 05:53:38Z

4

maybe this is what you want?

you can call cmdlets in place, using parentheses, like so:

Copy-Item -Path (Join-Path $template filename.ext) -Destination $destfolder

this causes PowerShell to go from "argument mode" to "expression mode" - i.e., it returns the output of the Join-Path cmdlet as an expression.

and yes, David's and Ansgar's suggestions are also helpful - try this to get full paths only:

(get-childitem $template) | select fullname

answered Nov 14, 2012 at 5:53

Nacht

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1 Comment

Bruce Over a year ago

These posts are all useful for what I am doing. I appreciate you taking time to instruct me.

Ansgar Wiechers · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-13 23:04:57Z

1

You could build the path like this:

$template = "D:\source\templatefiles\"
Copy-Item -Path "${template}filename.ext" ...

However, I think David's suggestion might be a better solution for your problem. You could map filenames to destination folders with a hash table and do something like this:

$locations = @{
  "foo" = "C:\some",
  "bar" = "C:\other",
  ...
}

Get-ChildItem $template | % { Copy-Item $_ $location[$_.Name] }

answered Nov 13, 2012 at 23:04

Ansgar Wiechers

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1 Comment

Bruce Over a year ago

Thank-you for your help. This is still quite useful in my project.

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