I am new to powershell and I am having a hard time applying this one command to all of the subfolders I have. I have used:
ls | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace "ALL",""}
And this works for only the one subfolder that I am in. This takes the ALL out of the files names as that is not needed for my purposes. How would I go about applying this command to all of the subfolders so I don't have to go in manually and apply them one at a time. So far, I have tried
dir -recurse ls | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace "ALL",""}
And this ran but didn't do anything to any of the files. I tried a few variations of this as well, but they did not compile.
Any help would be greatly appreciated
CodePudding user response:
A loop through the piped output would be what you are after.
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | ForEach-Object{Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName $($_.Name -replace "ALL","")}
This will apply the Rename-Item
for each line in the piped output.
CodePudding user response:
dir -recurse ls
dir
and ls
[1] are both aliases of PowerShell's Get-ChildItem
cmdlet, so you need:
- either
dir -recurse
- or
ls -recurse
- or - the best choice if you want to use an alias[2] -
gci -recurse
- or, finally, using the full cmdlet name,
Get-ChildItem -Recurse
To see all alias that are defined for Get-ChildItem
, run Get-Alias -Definition Get-ChildItem
.
Additionally, to limit processing to files, add the -File
switch:
Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace 'ALL' }
Note: I'm using '...'
quoting instead of "..."
quoting for conceptual clarity, given that the string's content is to be used verbatim (no string interpolation needed). Also, omitting the replacement-string operand of the -replace
operator defaults to ''
(the empty string), so it can be omitted.
As for what you tried:
this ran, but didn't do anything to any of the files
ls
in yourdir -recurse ls
command was positionally bound toGet-ChildItem
's-Path
parameter.Because of the highly unfortunate behavior of
-Path
in combination with-Recurse
, described in GitHub issue #5699, no error occurred, despite there (presumably) being no file or subdirectory literally namedls
.In effect,
Get-ChildItem
looked for an item namedls
on all levels of the subdirectory hierarchy and, in the absence of any, produced no output, i.e. amounted to a quiet no-op.While in your case this amounted to obscure failure, in the worst-case scenario it can be destructive, as discussed in the linked GitHub issue.
[1] on Windows; on Unix-like platforms, ls
refers to the platform-native /bin/ls
utility.
[2] This is the best choice, because it doesn't use the name of another shell's similar, but syntactically different command or utility. The name gci
is formed according to PowerShell's own naming conventions, where g
is the official alias abbreviation of the Get
, one of the approved verbs.