Cleverer Powershell

In my last post about Powershell, I chastised myself for trying to be too clever by trying to pipeline an entire script into one line.

Well, I think I’m starting to get the hang of the pipeline. My old foreach loop was something like this:

$files = Get-ChildItem . | Where-Object{(!$_.PSIsContainer)}

foreach ($file in $files) {
  if (InFileDeleteList($file.Name)) {
    Remove-Item -Force $file.FullName
  }
}

Taking a hint from a comment on a blog, the new script is condensed to (mostly) one line:

# Delete log files older than a month
$files = Get-ChildItem . | Where-Object{$_.Name -like "*.txt" -and $_.LastWriteTime -le [System.DateTime]::Now.AddDays(-30)} | Remove_Item -Force -Whatif

I kept trying to put $_ into the Remove-Item cmdlet but I finally realized I didn’t need it at all.