Windows is an API-driven operating system, and PowerShell is, too. Compared to other shells that use plain text as a common denominator and leave it to the user to give structure to the data via grep and regular expressions, PowerShell (and the underlying .NET framework) provides a rich set of data types that you can choose from to store data in a perfect way.
By default, PowerShell uses only basic data types such as [string] (text), [int] (numbers), [double] (floating point numbers), [datetime] (date and time) and [bool] (true and false).
You however can pick any other data type that you find more suitable:
PS> [System.IO.FileInfo]'c:\test\somefile.txt' Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- darhsl 01.01.1601 01:00 () somefile.txt PS> [System.IO.FileInfo]'c:\test\somefile.txt' | Select-Object -Property * Mode : darhsl VersionInfo : BaseName : somefile Target : LinkType : Name : somefile.txt Length : DirectoryName : c:\test Directory : c:\test IsReadOnly : True Exists : False FullName : c:\test\somefile.txt Extension : .txt CreationTime : 01.01.1601 01:00:00 CreationTimeUtc : 01.01.1601 00:00:00 LastAccessTime : 01.01.1601 01:00:00 LastAccessTimeUtc : 01.01.1601 00:00:00 LastWriteTime : 01.01.1601 01:00:00 LastWriteTimeUtc : 01.01.1601 00:00:00 Attributes : -1
By converting generic data types such as string to a more appropriate data type, it becomes much easier to access individual pieces of information. For example, if you’d like to parse a file path, by converting the string to [System.Io.FileInfo], you can easily split a path and extract drive, parent folder, file name, file name without extension, or the extension:
PS> $path = [System.IO.FileInfo]'c:\test\somefile.txt' PS> $path.DirectoryName c:\test PS> $path.FullName c:\test\somefile.txt PS> $path.Name somefile.txt PS> $path.BaseName somefile PS> $path.Extension .txt PS> $path.Directory.Parent Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- d--hs- 15.02.2023 17:33 c:\ PS> $path.Directory.Parent.Name c:\
