Powershell - match with array

Question

i´m a beginner in Powershell, i have some scripts working. but now I´m stucked with this little problem. I have this little script. I have a folder with some files $ORIGEN. I need to get all those name files that match with te values in the variable $ARCHIVOS, and put them in a new variable $DATA. Can anyone tell me how i can make a match between the names in $ARCHIVOS with the files in the folder?. If i use only 1 value in the variable $ARCHIVOS, it works fine, but when i have an array y doesn´t match with anything. I tried many solutions, but nothing. THanks in advance for some help. And sorry by my english

$ORIGEN= "C:\FILES\"
$ARCHIVOS='MLR*.384', 'MP0*.384'

 $data= Get-ChildItem $ORIGEN | Where-Object{$_.Name -match $ARCHIVOS}
 Write-Host $data

Answer 1

Combine Get-ChildItem (or, since you're not recursing, just Get-Item) with * and -Include, which (unlike -Filter) accepts an array of wildcard patterns:^[1]

Get-ChildItem -File $ORIGEN/* -Include $ARCHIVOS

• -File instructs Get-ChildItem to return matching files only (rather than also directories).

• The /* (\*) wildcard appended to the input path ($ORIGEN) is necessary, because _Include and -Exclude, in the absence of -Recurse, are only applied to the input path(s) themselves, not their child items.

  • This surprising behavior is discussed in GitHub issue #3304.

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If you want only the names of the matching files, simply access the .Name property on the output from the Get-ChildItem call via (...), the grouping operator, which, thanks to member-access enumeration, returns the matching files' names as an array (assuming there's at least two):

$fileNames = (Get-ChildItem -File $ORIGEN/* -Include $ARCHIVOS).Name

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As for what you tried, $_.Name -match $ARCHIVOS:

• The -match operator operates on regular expressions (regexes), not on wildcard expressions, yet your $ARCHIVOS array contains wildcard expressions.

• Additionally, -match doesn't (meaningfully) accept an array of regexes on the RHS.

• If you did want to solve this problem with -match (which isn't necessary, given the shorter and more efficient solution shown at the top), you'd have to create a single regex that uses alternation (|):

  # Note how the individual patterns are now expressed as *regexes*
  # and are *anchored* with ^ and $ to ensure that the *entire name* matches.
  # By default, -match finds *substrings*.
  $_.Name -match ('^MLR.*\.384$', '^MP0.*\.384$' -join '|')
  

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^{[1] Additionally, -Filter - which with a single pattern is generally preferable to -Include for performance reasons - doesn't use PowerShell's wildcard language, but delegates matching to the host platform's file-system APIs. This means that range or character-set expressions such as [0-9] and [fg] are not supported, and, on Windows, several legacy quirks affect the matching behavior - see this answer for more information.}