First If statement not detecting, or ElseIf overwriting?

PowerShell Help
1

Hi there! I have a script for work that runs an lookup in AD for computer names. We have a lot of computers and servers, and so I put a lot of conditions as to which naming conventions to ignore. For some reason, a certain naming convention keeps getting past my original (first) If statement, and passes it onto the next ElseIf’s. Here’s a the part of the code in question.

(#####Comments explain context#####)

The naming convention that is somehow defying the original if statement (which looks for “-” or “_”) is

Non-COE_X999999 (Which contains both of the conditions I’m looking for)

Instead, it goes ahead and tries to query for it in the ElseIf part, and I don’t get why.

 

If anyone can shed some light on this, that would be great. I don’t know if its the If statement that’s ignoring it, or the ElseIf which is somehow overwriting it, but either its not working right.

 

Thanks,
Mazarith

 

2
If I understand your problem correctly then you need to use “like “operator
$PCName -Like "*-*_*"
3

Yeah I thought maybe the filter had to do with it. So I tried to do more combinations, all the combinations, and for some reason only some of them work. -contains only works half the time, and I ended up having to seperate them as individual variables like so:

($PCName -like “-” -or $PCName -like “_”)

then I added an -not to make it a NOR statement.

-not(($PCName -like “-”) -or ($PCName -like “_”))

and that works…

Thanks @Evila Osa for your help, because I honestly wasn’t sure if it was just my elseif that was overwriting it… somehow.

 

Thanks!

4

You could opt for a few different things there.

Your difficulty with -in or -contains is that they aren’t string operators, they’re array operators.

"apple" -contains "a" # false
"a", "p", "p", "l", "e" -contains "a" # true

In contrast, strings have a .Contains() method that does work:

"apple".Contains("a") # true

For multiple things you want to check, you can also work in a bit of regex with a -match or -notmatch operator:

"apple" -match "a" # true

As for your problematic if statement, you could replace your -not, -like, and -or with a single -notmatch:

$PCName -notmatch '-|_'

Where regex is concerned, | is effectively a logical “or”. :slight_smile:

5

This is amazing! The last one did the trick perfectly. Appreciate the help!