Writing a powershell script to copy files with certain extension from one folder to another

Question

I would like to write a powershell script that gets the following parameters as input:
Folder to copy from, extensions allows, folder to copy to and a boolean indicating if the change should restart IIS, username and password.
What cmdlets should I be looking at considering that I am copying to a remote server?
How do I read the parameters into variables?
How do I restart IIS?

Cosidering that I might want to copy multiple folders, how do I write a powershell script that invokes a powershell script?

Answer 1

Get-ChildItem allows you to list files and directories, including recursively with filename filters. Copy-Item allows you to copy a file.

There is a lot of overlap in terms of selecting the files, often Copy-Item on its own is sufficient depending on the details of what you need (eg. do you want to retain the folder structure?)

To copy all *.foo and *.bar from StartFolder to DestFolder:

Copy-Item -path "StartFolder" -include "*.foo","*.bar" -Destination "DestFolder"

If you need to preserve the folder structure things get harder because you need to build the destination folder name, something like:

Get-ChildItem -path "StartFolder" -recurse -include "*.foo","*.bar" |
  Foreach-Object { Copy-Item -path $_ -destination { $_.FullName -replace "StartFolder","DestFolder"}}

But robocopy is likely to be easier:

robocopy StartFolder DestFolder *.foo *.bar /s

In the end the way to choose will depend on the details of what's needed.

(In the above I've avoided aliases (e.g. Copy-Item rather than copy) and explicitly use parameter names even if they are positional.)

Answer 2

If you are using IIS7, you can use native component to replicate content between IIS servers: http://blog.theplanet.com/2010/05/18/mirroring-server-content-and-configuration-in-iis7/

Answer 3

I can't address the IIS portion, but the file copy while preserving the directory structure can be a lot simpler than shown in the other answers:

Copy-Item -path "StartFolder" -Recurse -Include "*.foo","*.bar" -Destination "DestFolder" -Container

The -Container argument is the magic part that will replicate the structure in the destination as it is in the source.