Powershell Copy-item command not working in script although it does work when run from a command line

powershell

I am on a Windows 7 machine trying to execute a PowerShell script to copy a template directory to another directory. The command I am executing looks like:
Copy-Item -path "$projectsFolder$SourceFolder" -destination "$Test" -recurse -verbose;

The parameters are as follows:
path: C:\Users\username\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TemplateSolution\Source

Destination: C:\Users\username\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\test\source\main

When I run this command at a PowerShell prompt, the files are copied correctly. If I try and execute the command in the script with verbose enabled, it appears to copy the files and directories, but only the top level directory is created in the file system. I am not sure why this would happen and I would appreciate any guidance or troubleshooting steps to perform.

Best Answer

Make sure you put quotes around the directory names if they have spaces in them. Also, you may need the -Force parameter to create destination directories if they do not exist.

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Windows – How to recursively delete an entire directory with PowerShell 2.0

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force some_dir

does indeed work as advertised here.

rm -r -fo some_dir

are shorthand aliases that work too.

As far as I understood it, the -Recurse parameter just doesn't work correctly when you try deleting a filtered set of files recursively. For killing a single dir and everything below it seems to work fine.

Powershell – How to recursively search a directory for all files including hidden files in hidden directories, with PowerShell

You're doing it right. Just run it in an elevated console and remove the filter. If you don't care about permission errors, append -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue:

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\ -Filter lush* -Recurse -Force `
              -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue


Directory: C:\

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
-arhs        25.09.2013     12:16       1208 lush.asx

lush.asx has the ReadOnly, Hidden and System attributes.

You may also want to pipe to | select Name, Length, Directory to get rid of that unfortunate Directory: C:\ line. There's also a DirectoryName if you want the full path without the filename.

Best Answer

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