Get-ChildItem results looks like relative paths in Powershell

Question

I would like to scan and move folders (and sub folders or even deeper) from one folder to another using Powershell.

Currently I'm using this pipe of commands.

Get-ChildItem  -recurse  -path sub\WORK  -filter "* OK" | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer } | foreach { Move-Item -path $_  -destination sub\OK }

Unfortunately it doesn't work because the found results are relative to .\sub\WORK, when trying to move them Move-Item complains that the folders are not in the current folder:

Move-Item : Cannot find path 'C:\TMP\2011-12-12 test 2 OK' because it does not exist.

I expect that $_ would contain: 'C:\TMP\sub\WORK\2011-12-12 test 2 OK' because these are objects in Powershell and no strings like in Linux.

Answer 1

In case you use Get-ChildItem, be very careful. The best way is to pipe the objects to Move-Item and you don't need to think about it more:

Get-ChildItem  -recurse  -path sub\WORK  -filter "* OK" | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer } | Move-Item -destination sub\OK

(no need to use Foreach-Object)

The main reason why I'm answering is this one: Get-ChildItem constructs object differently, depending on the parameters. Look at examples:

PS C:\prgs\tools\Console2> gci -include * | % { "$_" } | select -fir 5
C:\prgs\tools\Console2\-verbose
C:\prgs\tools\Console2\1UpdateDataRepositoryServices.ps1
C:\prgs\tools\Console2\22-52-59.10o52l
C:\prgs\tools\Console2\2jvcelis.ps1
C:\prgs\tools\Console2\a
PS C:\prgs\tools\Console2> gci | % { "$_" } | select -fir 5
-verbose
1UpdateDataRepositoryServices.ps1
22-52-59.10o52l
2jvcelis.ps1
a

Then if you use $_ in a cycle and PowerShell needs to convert FileInfo from Get-ChildItem to string, it gives different results. That happened when you used $_ as argument for Move-Item. Quite bad.

I think there is a bug that reports this behaviour.