The file has the following content.

START Sun 04/17/2022 13:01:44.13 
END   Sun 04/17/2022 14:41:50.60

I'm trying to find a way to automate how many minutes it took from END to START time, I don't care about the seconds, just need to know how many minutes took to run. In this example it took 100 minutes but I had to calculate manually. I'd appreciate any feed back.

CodePudding user response：

Assuming that your input file is named file.txt:

$dates = [datetime[]] ((Get-Content file.txt) -replace '^\w   ')
[int] ($dates[1] - $dates[0]).TotalMinutes  # -> 100

• Your date-time strings are in a format that can be cast to [datetime] directly.

  • To extract the date-time string from each line, the first whitespace-separated token must be removed, which the regex-based -replace operator can do:

    • -replace '^\w ' matches one or more ( ) word characters (\w, letters, digits or _) at the start (^) of the string, followed by one more spaces, matching something like END . Since no replacement string is specified, the matched string is effectively removed.

  • -replace can operate on an array as its LHS, in which case the operation is performed on each element; therefore, all lines of the input file can serve as the input at once, as returned by Get-Content.

• Subtracting two [datetime] instances yields a [timespan] instance representing the span of time between the two points of time:

  • Its .TotalMinutes property reports the span in fractional minutes (as a [double] instance)
  • Casting that value to [int] yields an integral number of minutes, using half-to-even midpoint-rounding.

CodePudding user response：

New-TimeSpan and the ParseExact() or TryParse() method of from an object instance of DateTime will help you here.

$Start = [datetime]::ParseExact('04/17/2022 13:01:44.13', 'MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss.ff', $null)
$End = [datetime]::ParseExact('04/17/2022 14:41:50.60', 'MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss.ff', $null)
New-TimeSpan -Start $Start -End $End

This will provide an output like the below:

Days              : 0
Hours             : 1
Minutes           : 40
Seconds           : 6
Milliseconds      : 470
Ticks             : 60064700000
TotalDays         : 0.0695193287037037
TotalHours        : 1.66846388888889
TotalMinutes      : 100.107833333333
TotalSeconds      : 6006.47
TotalMilliseconds : 6006470

Access specifically minutes by doing something similar to the below:

> $result = New-TimeSpan -Start $Start -End $End
> $result.TotalMinutes
100.107833333333

# Round up to 2 decimal places
> [Math]::Round($result.TotalMinutes, 2)
100.11

# Round up to 0 decimal places
> [Math]::Round($result.TotalMinutes, 0)
100