Elseif statements only reading the "if" portion in boolean based statements-CodePudding

Good day everyone, I looked through some previous posts and unfortunately, was not able to find an answer that was applicable to my particular situation. The background is a I have script that removes Visual Studio and all its directory paths/registry entries which works. What I am having a problem with, is the validation. I am trying to validate that the certain paths/directories were removed.

What happens is, the function will only look at the first "if" statement and will seemingly ignore the other elseif and else statements I have included. I know I probably have them formatted wrong, as I am new to powershell There may be a better way to do this, and if so, feel free to share. Code seen below:

    function scriptvalidation{
$l1 = Test-Path -path "Path placeholder Number One"
$l2 = Test-Path -path "Path placeholder Number Two"
$l3 = Test-Path -path "Path placeholder Number Three"
$r1 = Test-Path -path "Registry path Number One"
$r2 = Test-Path -path "Registry path Number Two"
$r3 = Test-Path -path "Registry path Number Three"
$DirectoryArray = @($l1, $l2, $l3)
$RegistryArray = @($r1, $r2, $r3)

Above is the variables and arrays I used, below are the statements:

    if ($l1 -eq $true) {
Write-Host ("Path Placeholder number one was found and needs to be removed")
}
elseif ($l2 -eq $true) {
Write-Host ("Path Placeholder Number Two was found and needs to be removed")
}
elseif ($l3 -eq $true) {
Write-Host ("Path Placeholder Number three was found and needs to be removed")
}
else{[String] "$DirectoryArray -eq $false" Write-Host "Directory paths were removed successfully"
}


    if ($r1 -eq $true) {
Write-Host ("Registry Placeholder Number One was found and needs to be removed")
}
elseif ($r2 -eq $true) {
Write-Host ("Registry Placeholder Number Two was found and needs to be removed")
}
elseif ($r3 -eq $true) {
Write-Host ("Registry Placeholder Number Three was found and needs to be removed")
}
else{[String] "$RegistryArray -eq $false Write-Host "Registry paths were removed, script completed successfully"
}
scriptvalidation

That concludes this portion of my script, which I cannot get to run properly. When I have the program in question installed, the output I get is as follows: "Path Placeholder number one was found and needs to be removed" "Registry Placeholder Number one was found and needs to be removed" and that is it, nothing else.

I know I have this set up wrong, but being new, it has been tough to learn where it is wrong.

Any help would be appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

elseif means "if and only if the previous condition wasn't met AND this condition is met". Since file 2 might be present regardless of whether file 1 is, this is not the behavior your want.

Instead, use 3 separate if statements:

if ($l1) {
   Write-Host ("Path Placeholder number one was found and needs to be removed")
}

if ($l2) {
   Write-Host ("Path Placeholder Number Two was found and needs to be removed")
}

if ($l3) {
   Write-Host ("Path Placeholder Number three was found and needs to be removed")
}

Now the only thing needed is the last else block - here you'll want to test that neither of the $l* variables hold $true, which we can do like this:

if(-not($l1 -or $l2 -or $l3)){
  [string]"$DirectoryArray -eq $false" 
  Write-Host "Directory paths were removed successfully"
}

$l1 -or $l2 -or $l3 will evaluate to true if any of the three variables hold $true, so if they're all $false, this expression will be $false to - -not then inverts it so it's only ever $true if none of the variables are $true