Richard Siddaway's Blog

There are a number of cmdlets for working with paths

PS> Get-Command *path | select Name

Name
----
Convert-Path
Join-Path
Resolve-Path
Split-Path
Test-Path

Test-Path is the one I probably use most

PS> Test-Path -Path "C:\Users\Richard\Documents\PowerShell in Practice\TODO.txt"
True
PS> Test-Path -Path "C:\Users\Richard\Documents\PowerShell in Practice\Chapter1.docx"
False

It returns a Boolean – true if the path is found and false if not.  BTW don’t worry about the missing chapter it’s somewhere else.

One of my common uses for this is to test if a file exists before doing something

PS> if (Test-Path -Path "C:\Users\Richard\Documents\PowerShell in Practice\TODO.txt"){Write-Host "Found it"}
Found it

PS> if (Test-Path -Path "C:\Users\Richard\Documents\PowerShell in Practice\chapter1.docx"){Write-Host "Found it"}

else{Write-Host "Its gone"}
Its gone

We can also test if the path points to a file or a directory

PS> Test-Path -Path "C:\Users\Richard\Documents\PowerShell in Practice\TODO.txt" -PathType "leaf"
True
PS> Test-Path -Path "C:\Users\Richard\Documents\PowerShell in Practice\TODO.txt" -PathType "container"
False

The path cmdlets also work in other providers as we shall see later