Working with duration

PowerShell Help
1

Hello Guys,

Is there a direct way to handle the “duration” in powershell. For example, I have the below three duration and I would like to add them and get the result as a timespan object so that I can get the totalminutes or totalseconds etc.

PS [15:48:55] D:\> $a = "1:02:48" #hh:mm:ss

PS [15:48:57] D:\> $b = "21:38" #mm:ss

PS [15:49:01] D:\> $c = "44:21" #mm:ss
2

.NET has a “Timespan” object that represents a duration of time, and you can do math with them. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timespan(v=vs.110).aspx. There’s a static Parse() method that will accept a variety of string formats and return a Timespan object.

$ts = System.TimeSpan::Parse('hh:mm:ss')

That’s off the top of my head, so it might not be 100% accurate, but that’s the idea.

Once you have a Timespan, you can add or subtract others. A ToString() method of the Timespan lets you turn the Timespan into a readable string format.

3

Well, your $a, $b and $c variables are currently strings. You would need to have Timespan objects first, at which point they can simply be added together with the + operator. Whether you need to convert strings into timespans or just start with a timespan depends on what you’re doing; I’ll show examples of both here:

# Converting from strings.  Note that the colon character is escaped with a backslash in the patterns.
# Casting to [string[]] is necessary here to make sure the right overload of TimeSpan.ParseExact gets called.

[string[]] $patterns = @(
    'mm\:ss'
    'h\:mm\:ss'
    'hh\:mm\:ss'
)

$a = [timespan]::ParseExact('1:02:48', $patterns, [cultureinfo]::CurrentCulture)
$b = [timespan]::ParseExact('21:38', $patterns, [cultureinfo]::CurrentCulture)
$c = [timespan]::ParseExact('44:21', $patterns, [cultureinfo]::CurrentCulture)

$total = $a + $b + $c
$total

# Using New-Timespan instead of bothering with strings.  Less fragile and less annoying.  :)

$a = New-TimeSpan -Hours 1 -Minutes 2 -Seconds 48
$b = New-TimeSpan -Minutes 21 -Seconds 38
$c = New-TimeSpan -Minutes 44 -Seconds 21

$total = $a + $b + $c
$total
4

Thank you Dave & Don.