The directory creation time

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The directory creation time

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

SSC Guru

Points: 734418
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December 27, 2019 at 12:00 am

#3704491

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The directory creation time

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Shayn Thomas SSCertifiable Points: 5863 More actions · Answer 1

nice question and good reminder

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The more you know, the more you know that you dont know

Ray Herring SSCertifiable Points: 5533 More actions · Answer 2

This idiosyncrasy of PowerShell has frustrated me from day 1 of PS 2.0

When the variable is expanded, whether to use double or single quotes, curly braces etc.

The syntax of a language should not have such subtle differences, otherwise just use English. It has enough ambiguity for anyone 🙂

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 734418 More actions · Answer 3

I agree, Ray. PoSh was supposed to be logical and make more sense than Bash, etc. Instead, there are some silly items like this, and like -eq and -ne rather than respecting = or ==.

jkeefe SSC Enthusiast Points: 139 More actions · Answer 4

Actually, this makes perfect sense to me. The CreationTime is a property of the $directory object. In the quoted string, $directory.CreationTime cannot be determined because the parser doesn't recognize it as a simple data value. To get what you want you should do something like this:

$directory = Get-Item 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server'

$dTime = $directory.CreationTime

$message = "SQLDirectory Creation: $dTime"

This works because $dTime is a simple data value.

Jeffrey Williams SSC Guru Points: 90244 More actions · Answer 5

jkeefe wrote:

Actually, this makes perfect sense to me. The CreationTime is a property of the $directory object. In the quoted string, $directory.CreationTime cannot be determined because the parser doesn't recognize it as a simple data value. To get what you want you should do something like this:
$directory = Get-Item 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server'
$dTime = $directory.CreationTime
$message = "SQLDirectory Creation: $dTime"
This works because $dTime is a simple data value.

The problem is that Powershell recognizes $directory and parses its default value and then concatenates the rest of the string. To force an evaluation of the object property you can do this:

$message = "SQLDirectory Creation: $($directory.CreationTime)";

Jeffrey Williams
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”

― Charles R. Swindoll

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