Question

Whats the powershell command for finding files in a folder that do not meet a criteria of date range for the Get-Childitem filter of LastWriteTime.

So, check to see if a directory has files that DO NOT contain any files that have LastWriteTime between 01/10/2012 (1st Oct) to 25/10/2012 (25th Oct).

I want to display the folders that DO NOT have any files that are in that range…that way I know they are old and the whole directory can be deleted.

example of this is:

Folder1 – some files written within October – ignore this whole folder and do not display these in the results

Folder2 – NO file has LastWriteTime written in the month of October and so this folder and files should be displayed.

I know this can be done with Get-ChildItem and I am stuck on the bit below..

Get-ChildItem E:\LogArchive -Recurse | Where-Object{$_.LastWriteTime.......?

Answer 1

Simple solution off top of the head is this:

Where-Object{ $_.LastWriteTime -lt $startDate -or $_.LastWriteTime -gt $endDate }

where $startDate is 01/10/2012 (1st Oct) and $endDate is 25/10/2012 (25th Oct).

Problem with this approach is that it does not account for time factor in the [datetime]. So in your example, if you have 25-Oct-2012 as an upper bound, it will return files created at 25-Oct-2012 9:00, which you may not want.

Below code calculates [datetime]‘s with time part truncated, based on the input [datetime], and builds the month-to-date date range of ($dayStart, $dayEnd):

$entry_date = "20-Oct-2012 9:00" #to feed current date, use this: Get-Date
$dayEnd = Get-Date $entry_date -Minute 0 -Hour 0 -Second -0;
$dayStart = Get-Date $endDate -Day 1;
$dayStart, $dayEnd

For this sample code, here is the output:

Monday, October 01, 2012 12:00:00 AM 
Saturday, October 20, 2012 12:00:00 AM

Notice this approach is flexible, because you can set $entry_date to either Date or String, and it may or may not have time part – it will work in all those cases. You can then have this code in Where-Object:

Where-Object{ $_.LastWriteTime -lt $dayStart -or $_.LastWriteTime -ge $dayEnd.AddDays(1) }

Notice how -ge $dayEnd.AddDays(1) fixes the issue when comparing 25-Oct-2012 to 25-Oct-2012 9:00.