How can I use PowerShell to parse filenames and rename them?

Question

I've got a project analyzing logfiles. Someone, in their infinite wisdom, is naming the logfiles MM-DD-YYYY-HH-MM.LOG (e.g., 10-31-2012-18-00.LOG for 6:00pm on October 31, 2012).

My first order of business is to create something significantly more reasonable to work with by making copies of the existing logs named YYYYMMDD_HHMM.LOG (e.g., 20121031_1800.LOG for the above example), and must use powershell to accomplish this task.

So here's where I am so far:

$orgPath = "d:\testOrg\"
$newPath = "d:\testNew\"
$delim   = "-" ;

function copyFile {
"$($orgPath) copying Files to $($newPath)" 
Get-ChildItem $orgPath | `
foreach { 
  $nameArray = $_.Split($delim)
  $newName = Write-Output $nameArray[2]+$nameArray[0]+$nameArray[1]+"_"+$nameArray[3]+$nameArray[4] 
  $targetFile = $newPath + $_.FullName.SubString($orgPath.Length) 
  New-Item -ItemType File -Path $targetFile -Force  
  Copy-Item $_.FullName -destination $targetFile
  write-host $_.DirectoryName $_.newName  
  "File Copied"
}

and I keep getting an error

+ CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (Split:String) [], RuntimeException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : MethodNotFound

I know I'm missing something pretty stupid here...I just can't see it. Any other sets of eyes out there that can help me out?

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 28 '14 at 20:49

Get-ChildItem returns a list of File System objects, not just file names.

You can use the -Name option to get it to return just file names.

The output type is the type of the objects that the cmdlet emits.

• System.Object - The type of object that Get-ChildItem returns is determined by the objects in the provider drive path.

• System.String - If you use the Name parameter, Get-ChildItem returns the object names as strings.

Something like this:

$orgPath = "d:\testOrg\"
$delim = "-"

Get-ChildItem $orgPath -Name | `
foreach { 
  $nameArray = $_.Split($delim)
  $newName = $nameArray[2]+$nameArray[0]+$nameArray[1]+"_"+$nameArray[3]+$nameArray[4] 
  Write-Output $newName
}

How can I use PowerShell to parse filenames and rename them?

1 Answers1