Powershell Script DIY: removing items based on date
Warning: This DYI is potentially damaging, be absolutely
sure you want to do this and you test it in a sandbox first.
With that being said, today we are going to remove items
from a directory basted on their date. The
first thing we are going to do is define the directory. We start with “dir”:
Get-ChildItem
We need to define the location:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'
Now we use the –recurse operator. Recurse is short for recursive which, plainly
put means serch everything in subdirectories too. So if you don’t want it to do this, skip this
next step:
Get-ChildItem 'C:\Temp\'-recurse
Now that we have defined the scope of the commands, we need
to use the pipe operator in order to tell it “now that you have gotten c:\Temp
AND everything in every folder it contains do this”:
Get-ChildItem 'C:\Temp\'-recurse |
In order to diferenciate between files, we need to give
Powershell a conditional statement. We begin
this with “where”:
Get-ChildItem 'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where
When you use a conditional statement, such as foreach-Item
or Where, we need to encapsulate the statement itself in curley brackets {}:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {}
Because we want to remove old items we are going to use the
get-date command:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {(get-date)}
We encapsulate this in parantheses as well in order to say that
we are not getting the date from system time.
Next we define what date we want to get, which is the file creation time
time:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {
((get-date)-$_.creationTime)
Remember the -$_. The – indicates what to get, the $_ indicates
it is a list of items and the . belongs to .creationTime. Moving along we encapsulated all of that within
another set of parentheses to say that is a group that has a specific output,
creation time. We need to then do something with it to indicate the length of
time that has passed since it was created.
This is where we use .days:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {
((get-date)-$_.creationTime).days
Now here is where we accually select old items with the –ge operator. Remember if the file was created today, then
its age is 0. For our purpouses we will
say we want to select all files not created today:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {
((get-date)-$_.creationTime).days -ge 0
Now that we have selected the files that we want we need to
add an additional command, which means an additional Pipe operator:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {
((get-date)-$_.creationTime).days -ge 0} |
Now because we want to remove we use the remove-item
command, which was the same as del in
DOS:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {
((get-date)-$_.creationTime).days -ge 0} | remove-item
Remove-Item has a couple of switches in it that you can use,
for our purposes we are going to use the –force and the –recurse switches to
tell it to delete EVERYTHING selected and to do it nondescrimitory:
Get-ChildItem
'C:\Temp\'-recurse | where {
((get-date)-$_.creationTime).days -ge 0} | remove-item -force –recurse
And there you have it!
As usual please add your comments below and I fully encourage you to share
this with your colleagues. Also that
extra few clicks to +1, Like, Tweet, linkedin Goes a long way for me!
Sources: Microsoft Scripting guy http://preview.tinyurl.com/37ljrya,
Myself
