powershell wildcards in passing filenames as argument(s)

Question

I am running Python 3 on a Windows machine using PowerShell. I am trying to execute a Python file and then pass a number of files (file1.html, file2.html, etc.) as arguments using a wildcard character. I can get this to work, performing a couple of steps like below:

PS $files = Get-Item .\file*.html

PS python mypythonfile.py $files

My question is can this be done without having to use Get-Item and assigning the results to a variable? I tried running the same file like this python mypythonfile.py .\file*.html but this results in an error from the Python interpreter because PowerShell doesn't parse out the wildcard and passes the string with the wildcard.

Answer 1

It seems that you are in the interactive console. You do not need to assign the results of get-item to a variable, if that is all you are trying to achieve. Try this:

python mypythonfile.py (get-item .\file*.html)

Although this will work, you should really be passing Python the name of the file properly by using .FullName property of the resulting objects generated by get-item:

python mypythonfile.py (get-item .\file*.html).FullName