Permission Denied When Trying to Overwrite Hidden File

Question

I have been searching for a while and can't seem to understand why this is happening.

I have a script that maintains a file. I want to keep that file hidden, but changing the file attribute is causing permissions problems when trying to overwrite it.

Setup is this:

"Test Text" | Out-file 'C:\Test\Test.txt' -Force
Set-ItemProperty 'C:\Test\Test.txt' -name Attributes -Value "Hidden"

Now if I try to overwrite it like so I get the following error:

"New Text" | Out-file 'C:\Test\Test.txt' -Force

Out-file : Access to the path 'C:\Test\Test.txt' is denied. At line:1 char:15 + "Test Text" | Out-file 'C:\Test\Test.txt' -Force + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : OpenError: (:) [Out-File], UnauthorizedAccessException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : FileOpenFailure,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.OutFileCommand

But permissions don't seem to be the issue because I can get the content and I can remove the file just fine.

Get-Content 'C:\Test\Test.txt'

rm 'C:\Test\Test.txt' -force

The workaround is to remove the file then write my new one, but I would prefer to maintain the existing file and just add to it if possible.

Answer 1

Hidden files have to be deleted before you can "overwrite" them as Out-File does (without the -Append parameter). Add-Content and Set-Content work around this by modifying the existing file's content without overwriting it. See the docs on the FileMode.Create enum value.