I am trying to perform a recursive search that will merge files together into a single file within the directory the file was found. Find files named Dexis_Conflit_(*).dat and merge, or create into a file named dexis.dat. The .dat files are plain text. There are thousands of folders that I need to find and merge these files in. I have a basic PowerShell code that finds all of the files and their corresponding folders, but I cannot figure out how to merge them all into a single file within the correct directories.

Get-ChildItem -File -Include "dexis_conflict_(*).dat" -Path D:\apps\dexis\data -Recurse -OutVariable DEXIS.dat

I have tried using Out-File, Set-Content, Add-Content, and foreach but I cannot figure it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Most 95% of the folders will already have a dexis.dat file in it. All "conflict" files need to be merged into the main dexis.dat file. Those folders that do not have a dexis.dat file, it will need to be created and the conflict file merged into it.

CodePudding user response：

As always, there are plenty of ways to go about this using PowerShell so here's my take:

Get-ChildItem -Path "D:\apps\dexis\data" -Filter "dexis_conflict_(*).dat" -File -Recurse | 
    ForEach-Object -Begin {
        $saveTo = "DEXIS.dat"
    } -Process {
        $parentPath = Resolve-Path $_.PSParentPath -Relative 
        $jointPath  = Join-Path -Path $parentPath -ChildPath $saveTo
            if (-not (Test-Path -Path $jointPath)) {
                New-Item -Path $jointPath | Out-Null  
            }
        Get-Content -LiteralPath $_.FullName | Add-Content -LiteralPath $jointPath 
    }

Given that your files are just plain text files, there shouldn't be a need to use a specific file encoding such as bytes, but there is still that option if needed. Other than that, the rest is pretty simple. Using Resolve-Path we can can get rid of the unwanted prepended text PowerShell adds to the parent path. Then, using Join-Path we can create the file path of .\.\DEXIS.dat which we can test against. This is doable since PowerShell processes the files in each directory one at a time before moving onto the next sub-folder.

So...

• Test to see if dexis.dat exists, and if not, create the file.
• If the file does exist just append the content of each dexis_conflict_(*).dat file to it using Add-Content.

Now, every directory should have a DEXIS.dat file with merged content from file names of dexis_conflict_(*).dat.