Exclude list in PowerShell Copy-Item does not appear to be working

Question

I have the following snippet of PowerShell script:

$source = \'d:\\t1\\*\'
$dest = \'d:\\t2\'
$exclude = @(\'*.pdb\',\'*.config\')
Copy-Item $source $dest -R         


        

Answer 1

Get-ChildItem with Join-Path was working mostly for me, but I realized it was copying root directories inside the other root directories, which was bad.

For example

• c:\SomeFolder
• c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere
• c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere\Thing.txt
• c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere\SubFolder

• c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere\SubFolder\Thin2.txt

• Source Directory: c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere

• Destination Directory: d:\PutItInHere

Goal: Copy every childitem Inside c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere to the root of d:\PutItInHere, but not including c:\SomeFolder\CopyInHere itself.
- E.g. Take all the children of CopyInHere and make them Children of PutItInHere

The above examples do this most of the way, but what happens is It Creates a folder Called SubFolder, and Creates a Folder in Folder called SubFolder.

That's because Join-Path Calculates a destination path of d:\PutItInHere\SubFolder for the SubFolder child item, so SubFolder get's created in a Folder called SubFolder.

I got around this by Using Get-ChildItems to bring back a collection of the items, then using a loop to go through it.

Param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$True,Position=1)][string]$sourceDirectory,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$True,Position=2)][string]$destinationDirectory
)
$sourceDI = [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]$sourceDirectory
$destinationDI = [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]$destinationDirectory
$itemsToCopy = Get-ChildItem $sourceDirectory -Recurse -Exclude @('*.cs', 'Views\Mimicry\*')
foreach ($item in $itemsToCopy){        
    $subPath = $item.FullName.Substring($sourceDI.FullName.Length)
$destination = Join-Path $destinationDirectory $subPath
if ($item -is [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]){
    $itemDI = [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]$item
    if ($itemDI.Parent.FullName.TrimEnd("\") -eq $sourceDI.FullName.TrimEnd("\")){      
        $destination = $destinationDI.FullName  
    }
}
$itemOutput = New-Object PSObject 
$itemOutput | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name Source -Value $item.FullName
$itemOutput | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name Destination -Value $destination
$itemOutput | Format-List
Copy-Item -Path $item.FullName -Destination $destination -Force
}

What this does in short, is it uses the current item's full name for the destination calculation. However it then checks to see if it is a DirectoryInfo object. If it is it checks if it's Parent Folder is the Source Directory, that means the current folder being iterated is a direct child of the source directory, as such we should not append it's name to the destination directory, because we want that folder to be created in the destination directory, not in a folder of it's in the destination directory.

Following that, every other folder will work fine.