Powershell 2 copy-item which creates a folder if doesn't exist

Question

$from = \"\\\\something\\1 XLS\\2010_04_22\\*\"
$to =  \"c:\\out\\1 XLS\\2010_04_22\\\"
copy-item $from $to -Recurse 

This works if c:\\out\\

Answer 1

Here's an example that worked for me. I had a list of about 500 specific files in a text file, contained in about 100 different folders, that I was supposed to copy over to a backup location in case those files were needed later. The text file contained full path and file name, one per line. In my case, I wanted to strip off the Drive letter and first sub-folder name from each file name. I wanted to copy all these files to a similar folder structure under another root destination folder I specified. I hope other users find this helpful.

# Copy list of files (full path + file name) in a txt file to a new destination, creating folder structure for each file before copy
$rootDestFolder = "F:\DestinationFolderName"
$sourceFiles = Get-Content C:\temp\filelist.txt
foreach($sourceFile in $sourceFiles){
    $filesplit = $sourceFile.split("\")
    $splitcount = $filesplit.count
    # This example strips the drive letter & first folder ( ex: E:\Subfolder\ ) but appends the rest of the path to the rootDestFolder
    $destFile = $rootDestFolder + "\" + $($($sourceFile.split("\")[2..$splitcount]) -join "\")
    # Output List of source and dest 
    Write-Host ""
    Write-Host "===$sourceFile===" -ForegroundColor Green
    Write-Host "+++$destFile+++"
    # Create path and file, if they do not already exist
    $destPath = Split-Path $destFile
    If(!(Test-Path $destPath)) { New-Item $destPath -Type Directory }
    If(!(Test-Path $destFile)) { Copy-Item $sourceFile $destFile }
}