Remove line from txt file if -notmatch

PowerShell Help
1

The first part of my script seems to work fine. I am generating a list of accounts using compare-object. I am having trouble with the foreach-object. I want to exclude the line from my results if it matches any value in my $AccountsToRemove variable. Any help on what I am doing wrong would be appreciated. Final1.txt is comma delimited, $AccountsToRemove is a list of usernames.

$UserResultsPath1 = “c:\final1.txt”
$UserResultsPath2 = “c:\final2.txt”

$Compare1 = import-csv -Path $UserResultsPath1
$Compare2 = import-csv -Path $UserResultsPath2

$AccountsToRemove = Compare-Object $Compare1 $Compare2 -property SamAccountName `
| where-object {$_.SideIndicator -eq '<='} |Select-Object -Property SamAccountName -ExpandProperty SamAccountName

$file = New-Object System.IO.StreamReader -Arg $UserResultsPath1
while ($line = $file.ReadLine()) {

$AccountsToRemove | ForEach-Object {$_ -notmatch $line} | out-file "c:\finalresults.txt" -append
write-host $line

}
$file.close()

2

You should really omit -Property from Select-Object; -ExpandProperty is what you need.

Also, -match and -notmatch are regular expression comparisons. Not knowing what your strings look like, that’s something to be aware of. If you’re testing for an exact string match, you use -eq or -neq.

Finally, I think you’re probably making this a lot harder on yourself. let’s assume $AccountsToRemove is an array of strings like “DonJ”,“ChrisG”,“GregS”. Let’s assume your text file contains DonJ and GregS, with one name per line.

$AccountsToRemove = Compare-Object $Compare1 $Compare2 -property SamAccountName `
| where-object {$_.SideIndicator -eq '<="} |
Select-Object -ExpandProperty SamAccountName

$lines = Get-Content $UserResultsPath1

foreach ($account in $accountstoremove) {
  if ($account -in $lines) {
    # name was found in file
  }
}

-contains, -notcontains, -in, and -notin will probably work a lot faster to determine if Object A exists in Collection B.