Need help iterating through folders

PowerShell Help
1

Hi All, I’m a self thought an fairly new to Powershell so be gentle :slight_smile: . I need to iterate through some folders and execute some commands in each folder. So far i have this but is stops at the first folder. Of all the things i am missing what exactly is the reason why it is not iterating. thx

Function Start-Cleanup ($folder){

    $z = (Get-ChildItem -File $folder\*.zip | Measure-Object | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Count)

    $c = (Get-ChildItem -File $folder\*.conf | Measure-Object | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Count)

        if ($z -lt 3){

            Write-Output "$folder Less or 3 backup available, nothing to do "

            break

            }

        else {

            Write-Output "$folder Removing old files"

            Get-ChildItem $folder\*.zip | Where-Object -Property LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-60) | Remove-Item -force

            }

        if ($c -lt 3){

            Write-Output "$folder Less or 3 config backups available, nothing to do"

            break

            }

        else {

            Write-Output "$folder Removing old config files"

            Get-ChildItem $folder\*.conf | Where-Object -Property LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-60) | Remove-Item -force

            }

    }

$target = Get-ChildItem -Directory "C:\tempL"

foreach ($i in $target){

    Start-Cleanup $i

}
2

What’s your folder structure like in tempL?

Is it one folder with a number of subfolders nested directly?
Like this:

C:\tempL
|_DirA
|_DirB

Or do you mean that you have a deeper folder structure like this?

C:\tempL
|_DirA
   |_DirA1
|_DirB
  |_DirB1
  |_DirB2

If it’s the second and your script is not going into the sub-subfolders it’s because you need to add the -Recurse parameter to this line in your code:

$target = Get-ChildItem -Directory "C:\tempL"

Changing it to this:

$target = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory "C:\tempL"

If it’s the first and you are only getting one folder of many directly in the tempL directory I would try the foreach part like this:

$target = Get-ChildItem -Directory "C:\tempL"

foreach ($i in $target){
    Write-Output $i
}

To check if it actually returns all the expected folders.

3

Thanks for your reply laage. apparently there are more things wrong here… . I can tell you that i only need items in subfolder of tempL. When i do write-output i get all the folders listed.

Directory: C:\tempL

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
d----          29/03/2022    15:26                K11204
d----          29/03/2022    10:30                K11392
d----          29/03/2022    09:07                K11546

for testing i removed the first folder and upon running script again it seemed to run on all the others.

C:\tempL\K11392 Removing old files
C:\tempL\K11392 Removing old config files
C:\tempL\K11546 Removing old files
C:\tempL\K11546 Less or 3 config backups available, nothing to do

Now i need to figure out to keep 3 files…

thx

4

Just found that using “break” in IF statement Powershell stops running the script.

so, problem solved!

5

Yes. Of course.
Can’t believe I missed that.
You use break to exit a loop, but if you’re not in a loop it exits the entire script.

1 Like
6

It might not make a big difference for this particular case but when you do something like this in a larger environment it could become relevant.

In your little function you query the same folder up to 4 times. That could be quite time consuming and is actually unnecessary.
Something liket his should run a little faster I’d expect:

Function Start-Cleanup ($folder) {

    $FileInventory = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -File
    $ZipInventory  = $FileInventory | Where-Object -Property Extension -EQ -Value '.zip'
    $ConfInventory = $FileInventory | Where-Object -Property Extension -EQ -Value '.conf'

    if ($($FileInventory.Count) -lt 3) {
        Write-Output "$folder Less or 3 backup available, nothing to do "
    }
    else {
        Write-Output "$folder Removing old files"
        $ZipInventory | Where-Object -Property LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-60) | Remove-Item -Force
    }
    if ($($ConfInventory.Count) -lt 3) {
        Write-Output "$folder Less or 3 config backups available, nothing to do"
    }
    else {
        Write-Output "$folder Removing old config files"
        $ConfInventory | Where-Object -Property LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-60) | Remove-Item -Force
    }
}

You query the folder only once and work with the collected data later on. :wink:

1 Like