Question

I need to copy only certain parts of a folder using Powershell, specifically this list:

$files = @("MyProgram.exe",
           "MyProgram.exe.config",
           "MyProgram.pdb",
           ".\XmlConfig\*.xml")

In human readable form: 3 specific MyProgram.* files under root of target folder and all XML files under XmlConfig folder which itself is under root of source path (..\bin\Release\ in my case). XmlConfig folder must be created in destination, if it does not exist.

What I have tried:

(1) I tried the following, but it did not work, i.e. no folder or files were created at the destination path:

Copy-Item -Recurse -Path "..\bin\Release\" -Destination ".\Test\" -Include $files

(2) When -Include is removed, whole folder structure is successfully created, including subfolders and files:

Copy-Item -Recurse -Path "..\bin\Release\" -Destination ".\Test\"

It must be something wrong with my understanding of how -Include filter works:

(3) I tested an assumption that -Include needs an array of wildcards, but this did not work either:

$files = @("*MyProgram.exe*",
           "*MyProgram.exe.config*",
           "*MyProgram.pdb*",
           "*.\XmlConfig\*.xml*")

---

Please advise on how to properly do Copy-Item in my case.

UPDATE (based on below answers):

I am looking for a generic implementation that takes an array of strings. It opens the possibility to put all necessary files/paths in one place, for easy editing, so that a non-Powershell knowledgeable person can understand and modify it as required. So in the end it would be single script to perform XCOPY deployments for any project, with input file being the only variable part. For above example, the input would look like this (saved as input.txt and passed as an argument to the main script):

MyProgram.exe
MyProgram.exe.config
MyProgram.pdb
.\XmlConfig\*.xml

I would prefer wildcards approach, since not many people know regex.

Answer 1

i don’t know what is wrong with filter but you can still do

$files | % { copy-item ..\bin\release\$_ -Destination .\test}

if you want to preserve directoty structure you’ll have to weak this a little, like :

$sourcedir="c:\temp\test"
$f=@("existing.txt","hf.csv";"..\dir2\*.txt")
$f |%{
     $source=ls (join-Path $sourcedir $_) |select -expand directoryname    
     if ("$source" -like "$sourcedir*"){
        $destination=$source.Substring($sourcedir.Length)+".\" 
     }
     else{
        $destination=$_
     }  
    copy-item $sourcedir\$_ -Destination $destination -WhatIf
}