How to copy file names matching a regex in powershell?

Question

I am new to powershell. I need to copy the whole folder structure from source to destination with filenames matching a pattern. I am doing the following. But it just copies the content in the root directory. For example

"E:\Workflow\mydirectory\file_3.30.xml"

does not get copied.

Here is my sequence of commands.

PS F:\Tools> $source="E:\Workflow"
PS F:\Tools> $destination="E:\3.30"
PS F:\Tools> $filter = [regex] "3.30.xml"
PS F:\Tools> $bin = Get-ChildItem -Path $source | Where-Object {$_.Name -match $filter}
PS F:\Tools> foreach ($item in $bin) {Copy-Item -Path $item.FullName -Destination $destination}
PS F:\Tools> foreach ($item in $bin) {Copy-Item -Path $item.FullName -Destination $destination -recurse}

Raf · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-29 11:56:34Z

7

You have a few problems. First of all, add -Recurse switch to Get-ChildItem so all files matching filter will be found no matter how deep. Then you need to recreate the original directory structure as you can't copy a file to a directory which doesn't exist. The -ea 0 switch on md will make sure errors are ignored when creating new dir - the following will do the trick:

$source="E:\Workflow"
$destination="E:\3.30"
$filter = [regex] "3.30.xml"
$bin = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path $source | Where-Object {$_.Name -match $filter}
foreach ($item in $bin) {
    $newDir = $item.DirectoryName.replace($source,$destination)
    md $newDir -ea 0
    Copy-Item -Path $item.FullName -Destination $newDir
}

answered Mar 29, 2014 at 11:56

Raf

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1 Comment

ZaxLofful Over a year ago

I know this is a long time after, but thank you very much for creating such a good tutorial on how to do this. :)

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