Powershell: Using Get-ChildItem with variables

Question

I am writing a script that will iterate through folders, grabbing substrings of the folder names as variable values, and then iterate through the log files in each of the folders and get some data out of the log files for output to a .csv file. Where I am running into an issue is with the use of Get-ChildItem with variables I have already set. When I run this line by itself, it does not provide any value:

#running this to see the value of $files
$files = Get-ChildItem $_.FullName $folder

$files does not then contain any value.

Here is the entire portion of the script, for reference and context:

#get all folders from the Logs directory    
$folders = Get-ChildItem "C:\Temp\MPOS\Logs"

#iterate through each folder
foreach ($folder in $folders) {

#set substrings of the folder name to variables
$storeNumber = $folder.Name.Substring(2,3)
$date = $folder.Name.Substring(9,7)
#get all files from the current folder being evaluated
$files = Get-ChildItem $_.FullName $folder

#iterate through each file in the current folder
foreach ($file in $files) {

    #set substring of the file name to a variable
    $registerNumber = $file.Name.Substring(12,4)
    #get content of the file
    $logfileContent = Get-Content $file
    #look for all matches of the string "TransactionNumber"
    $transactions = Select-String -InputObject $logfileContent -Pattern "TransactionNumber" -AllMatches
    #count number of matches from above
    $transactionCount = $transactions.Matches.Count

    #below info is creating the object for the .csv
    $transObject = New-Object PSObject

    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "StoreNumber" -Value $storeNumber
    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Sales Date" -Value $date
    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "RegisterNumber" -Value $registerNumber
    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Transactions" -Value $transactionCount

    $resultsArray += $transObject
    }
}

$resultsArray | Export-Csv C:\Temp\MPOS\MPOSTransactions.csv -NoTypeInformation

Answer 1

Edited code below - changed to read $folder.FullName - working now!

$resultsArray = @()
$folders = Get-ChildItem "C:\Temp\MPOS\Logs"

foreach ($folder in $folders) {

$storeNumber = $folder.Name.Substring(2,3)
$date = $folder.Name.Substring(9,7)
$files = Get-ChildItem $folder.FullName

foreach ($file in $files) {

    $registerNumber = $file.Name.Substring(12,4)
    $logfileContent = Get-Content $file.FullName
    $transactions = Select-String -InputObject $logfileContent -Pattern "TransactionNumber" -AllMatches
    $transactionCount = $transactions.Matches.Count

    $transObject = New-Object PSObject

    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "StoreNumber" -Value $storeNumber
    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Sales Date" -Value $date
    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "RegisterNumber" -Value $registerNumber
    $transObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Transactions" -Value $transactionCount

    $resultsArray += $transObject
    }
}

$resultsArray | Export-Csv C:\Temp\MPOS\MPOSTransactions.csv -NoTypeInformation

Answer 2

I had this exact issue, but I found out in my case I was trying to load a variable by piping in a value that also was using Format-Table command.

Example: (this worked) $GetMostRecentFile = $GetLatestFile = Get-ChildItem -Force -Recurse -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Where-Object { $.LastWriteTime.Date -lt (Get-Date).Date -and $.Name -ne 'Thumbs.db' -and $_.Name -ne '.DS_Store'} | Sort LastWriteTime -Descending | Select-Object -First 1 LastWriteTime,FullName,Length

(this didn't work) $GetLatestFile = Get-ChildItem -Force -Recurse -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Where-Object { $.LastWriteTime.Date -lt (Get-Date).Date -and $.Name -ne 'Thumbs.db' -and $_.Name -ne '.DS_Store'} | Sort LastWriteTime -Descending | Select-Object -First 1 LastWriteTime,FullName,Length | Format-Table -Wrap

Because I'd been using Format-Table as part of my commands to explore this data and build my queries, I forgot that if you pipe this (with FT) to a variable, the variable won't have the details.

In my case above, I needed to pull $GetMostRecentFile.FullName and $GetMostRecentFile.LastWriteTime pulled into another array. But when I was piping with FT, there was not $GetMostRecentFile.FullName. When I remove