Question

I’m trying to do some processing on the output from a psftp “ls” command. Basically, I want to put all of the file names that match certain conditions into an array. I have this:

PS C:\path\to\pwd> $a = & "C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\psftp.exe" -l myusername -batch -pw mypassword -b sftpbatch.txt myserver | where {$_.split(" ", [StringSplitOptions]'RemoveEmptyEntries')[0] -eq "-rw-r--r--"} | select-object {$_.split(" ", [StringSplitOptions]'RemoveEmptyEntries')[8]}

(If you want more details about that command, I can provide them. The output is very similar to the output of the “ls” command in PowerShell.)

It seems to me that I can do better by selecting the split first, then filtering it with where. When I try this:

$a = & <# ... #> | select-object {$_.split(" ", [StringSplitOptions]'RemoveEmptyEntries')} | where { $_[0] -eq "-rw-r--r--" }

I get

Unable to index into an object of type System.Management.Automation.PSObject.

How can I simplify this?

Answer 1

Something like this should work.

$a = & <#...#>| % {$b = $_ -split ' '|?{$_}; if($b[0] -eq '-rw-r--r--'){$b[8]}}

If you are placing this in a script, I would replace the alias % with Foreach-Object, and the alias ? with Where-Object

Edit:

Here is a more pipeline-oriented approach:

'-rw-r--r-- 1 2 3   4 5 6 7 test.txt'| 
    select @{Name='Words'; Expression={$_ -split ' '|where {$_}}}|
    where {$_.Words[0] -eq "-rw-r--r--"}|
    foreach {$_.Words[8]}