Powershell's Get-date: How to get Yesterday at 22:00 in a variable?

Question

For a check i need yesterday\'s date at 10:00pm in a variable.

I get yesterdays Date and current Time with

$a = (get-date).AddDays(-1)

Answer 1

I saw in at least one other place that people don't realize Date-Time takes in times as well, so I figured I'd share it here since it's really short to do so:

Get-Date # Following the OP's example, let's say it's Friday, March 12, 2010 9:00:00 AM
(Get-Date '22:00').AddDays(-1) # Thursday, March 11, 2010 10:00:00 PM

It's also the shortest way to strip time information and still use other parameters of Get-Date. For instance you can get seconds since 1970 this way (Unix timestamp):

Get-Date '0:00' -u '%s' # 1268352000

Or you can get an ISO 8601 timestamp:

Get-Date '0:00' -f 's' # 2010-03-12T00:00:00

Then again if you reverse the operands, it gives you a little more freedom with formatting with any date object:

'The sortable timestamp: {0:s}Z{1}Vs measly human format: {0:D}' -f (Get-Date '0:00'), "`r`n"
# The sortable timestamp: 2010-03-12T00:00:00Z
# Vs measly human format: Friday, March 12, 2010

However if you wanted to both format a Unix timestamp (via -u aka -UFormat), you'll need to do it separately. Here's an example of that:

'ISO 8601: {0:s}Z{1}Unix: {2}' -f (Get-Date '0:00'), "`r`n", (Get-Date '0:00' -u '%s')
# ISO 8601: 2010-03-12T00:00:00Z
# Unix: 1268352000

Hope this helps!