PowerShell One-Liners for Managing the File System

Executive Summary:

Windows PowerShell can help ease your Windows operating system (OS) file management.

Windows PowerShell includes many built-in aliases for cmdlets to make writing code easier.

Simple Windows PowerShell "one-liners" can be used to retrieve files and folders, copy them, move them, and create or delete them.

If you’ve used the command prompt to manage files and folders on your Windows systems, you know how easy many file-management tasks can be. You’ll find you can perform many of these tasks just as easily by using Windows PowerShell. In fact, you can take advantage of the full scripting and pipelining capabilities of PowerShell to carry out your file-system operations.

Getting Started, Getting Help
As you move into PowerShell, you should familiarize yourself with the basic commands—the “one-liners”—that let you access and manipulate files and folders. The best place to begin is with one of the most basic file-system commands: retrieving the name of the current working directory. To do so, enter the following command at the PowerShell command prompt:

get-location

As Figure 1 shows, the get-location cmdlet retrieves the name of the working directory (C, in this example) and returns it to the PowerShell window. . . .