select second or third object / element

Question

I want to select the second/third/forth object of a Get-ChildItem statement in my PowerShell script. This gives me the first:

$first = Get-Child         


        

Answer 1

For selecting the n-th element skip over the first n-1 elements:

$third = Get-ChildItem -Path $dir |
         Sort-Object CreationTime -Descending |
         Select-Object -Skip 2 |
         Select-Object -First 1

or select the first n and then of those the last element:

$third = Get-ChildItem -Path $dir |
         Sort-Object CreationTime -Descending |
         Select-Object -First 3 |
         Select-Object -Last 1

Beware, though, that the two approaches will yield different results if the input has less than n elements. The first approach would return $null in that scenario, whereas the second approach would return the last available element. Depending on your requirements you may need to choose one or the other.