Find time difference in minutes using a PowerShell script

Question

I am trying to find the time difference between the last updated time and current time for a file. How do I extract TotalMinutes data from the output?

$Date = Get-Date
$Files = gci "C:\Users\ABCD\Documents\command.txt"
ForEach ($File in $Files){
    $FileDate = $File.LastWriteTime
}
$DURATION=$Date-$FileDate
Echo $DURATION

Output is coming as below
Days              : 0
Hours             : 2
Minutes           : 21
Seconds           : 37
Milliseconds      : 311
Ticks             : 84973115857
TotalDays         : 0.0983485137233796
TotalHours        : 2.36036432936111
TotalMinutes      : 141.621859761667
TotalSeconds      : 8497.3115857
TotalMilliseconds : 8497311.5857

Answer 1

You will not need a loop, after getting a single file:

$Files = gci "C:\Users\ABCD\Documents\command.txt"
ForEach ($File in $Files){
    $FileDate = $File.LastWriteTime
}

In this case, $Files might as well be $File, making the loop completely redundant:

$File = gci "C:\Users\ABCD\Documents\command.txt"
$FileDate = $File.LastWriteTime

In the exact same way you extracted LastWriteTime, you can get TotalMinutes:

$Date = Get-Date
$DURATION = $Date - $FileDate
$DURATION.TotalMinutes

Answer 2

Here is a complete answer:

$Date = Get-Date
$Files = gci "C:\Users\ABCD\Documents\command.txt"
ForEach ($File in $Files){
    $FileDate = $File.LastWriteTime
}
$DURATION=$Date-$FileDate
Write-Host "$($DURATION.TotalMinutes)"

Answer 3

You can use the below command to get just TotalMinutes

$mins = $DURATION.TotalMinutes