Powershell to the rescue

A few days ago I found myself mentioning that I’m not really using Powershell very much, and today I find it helping me out – proving my point, it’s incredibly powerful if you can take the time to get to know it well.. which I’ve not really done yet!

One of the solutions we’ve inherited from another development company is littered with previous Visual Source Safe files. As you can imagine, all trace of VSS is something that needs to be exterminated from this earth, so even though these files aren’t harming anything* their existence alone is a source of annoyance. Seriously, it’s 2010, and if you’re not suitably embarrassed about letting people know you use Source Safe then.. well.. words fail me.

Simplest way to kill the files (*.vspscc and *.scc) would be to use Windows Search and delete the results, however they don’t show up in Windows search, as they’re hidden, and I didn’t want to do a blanket unhide in case it messed with our own Subversion bindings. There’s various ways you can do this with a DOS batch file, but the first few examples I found didn’t work – DOS, YOU’VE LET ME DOWN! WHY?

So I found a simple PS example used to remove *.tmp files, which looks like this: get-childitem c:\ -include *.tmp -recurse | foreach ($_) {remove-item $_.fullname}

It didn’t work, but the reason was simple enough – by default get-childitem excludes hidden files. To show them, you add the –force parameter. I kind of like the fact that it uses such strong language for things like that. I also added –force to remove-item. It wasn’t needed to remove the *.vspscc files, but was for the *.scc files.

Here’s the PS command which did the job in the end (obviously I ran it twice and changed the file pattern):

get-childitem C:\location\of\code\etc\ -include *.vspscc -recurse -force | foreach ($_) {remove-item $_.fullname –force}

Job done. Another useful snippet for the Powershell library.

* Although there’s some interesting reading floating about at the moment regarding use of source control meta files which get deployed to public facing servers as a valid means of obtaining code, check out Risky Business episode #179 if you’d like to know more.

Tags: Powershell, SourceSafe

 Print | Posted on Monday, December 13, 2010 10:43 PM |