Powershell script for moving files

I needed to move a large number of files from one directory into an archive every month and only files over one month old.

Although this, in itself, is not a hard task, I wanted to automate it in a script and thought it was time to learn a bit of Powershell.

Let me take through the steps I took to build the final 1 line script.

Lets get started

The first part of the command is to get a list of files in the folder. I found the command I needed was Get-Childitem.

Get-Childitem -Path "C:\CurrentPath\" -Recurse

This scans the folder in C:\CurrentPath and gets a list of files.

I now need to check the date of these files and only scan for files older than 1 month. The query for this uses the lastwritetime:

Where lastwritetime -LT $(Get-Date).AddMonths(-1)

we use a variable $(Get-Date) to get today’s date and the add -1 month (subtract a month) to get the date one month ago.

We put them together through a pipe (|) and get:

Get-Childitem -Path "C:\CurrentPath\" -Recurse | Where lastwritetime -LT $(Get-Date).AddMonths(-1)

I now need to move this list of files to another folder. For this we can use the Move-Item command:

Move-Item -Destination "C:\Moved\"

We put it all together, with another pipe, to get the full command:

Get-Childitem -Path "C:\CurrentPath\" -Recurse | Where lastwritetime -LT $(Get-Date).AddMonths(-1) | Move-Item -Destination "C:\Moved\"

So, to review the command, we have 3 steps.

Step 1: We get a list of all files in the folder, and using the pipe we pass these results onto the next step.

Step 2: We then filter these to files older than a month and pass the results onto the move command.

Step 3: We take the output of the filter and use this list to move the files.

I saved this file as movefiles.ps1 then created a scheduled task to run powershell.exe with the following arguments:

-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File C:\Test\movefiles.ps1

Schedule this to run as frequently as you want and there you have it, a scheduled task to move old files to an archive on a regular basis.

Hope this help, and if it does please leave a comment below,

Thanks

Ian