I'm trying to automatically rename all *.txt files to *.log files, but only if they contain the upper case string ERROR.
However, the following code doesn't work:
Get-ChildItem *.txt -file | Select-String "ERROR" | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace '.txt','.log' }
I'm getting the following error message:
Rename-Item : Cannot bind argument to parameter 'NewName' because it is an empty string.
I found out that I can get the actual path with:
Get-ChildItem *.txt -file | Select-String "ERROR" | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.Path }
but I can't figure out how to use it with Rename-Item
.
I also tried:
Get-ChildItem *.txt -file | Select-String "ERROR" | [io.path]::ChangeExtension($_.name, "log")
but I got the following error message:
Expressions are only allowed as the first element of a pipeline.
Select-String -Path *.txt -List -CaseSensitive 'ERROR' |
Rename-Item -NewName { $_.FileName -replace '\.txt$', '.log' } -WhatIf
Note: The -WhatIf
common parameter in the command above previews the operation. Remove -WhatIf
and re-execute once you're sure the operation will do what you want.
Use -CaseSensitive
to ensure case-sensitive matching.
Use -List
to stop searching after the first match in a given file has been found, as an optimization.
Take advantage of Select-String
's -Path
parameter that directly accepts a wildcard pattern of files to look for - no need for a separate Get-ChildItem
call in this case.
Since it is the Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.MatchInfo
instances emitted by Select-String
that provide the input to Rename-Item
- via their .Path
property - you must use their .FileName
property to refer to the file name in the calculated property passed to -NewName
.