OmegaMan's Musings

I had a need to take an existing directory with a specific set of files and create new copies of those files, but with new random names. These new files would test a process which needed a lot of files to be loaded and the files had to be of a specific format and data such as a zip archive.

gci {TargetDirectory} -file  | Copy-Item -Destination { "$([System.IO.Path]::GetRandomFileName()).{Target Extension}" } -whatif

• This operation copies the file to the current directory.
• The GetRandomFileName will generate both random text and random lettered extensions.

I needed my files to be all of the same type so I this is the format I used:

gci C:\Test\Initial -file  | Copy-Item -Destination { "$([System.IO.Path]::GetRandomFileName()).zip" } -whatif



I ran into this need while downloading the Oracle VirtualBox Image for its Developer Database which was 7ziped into 14 files. I wanted a way to view all the checksums using Windows 10 certutil program without having to type it into the command line. Here is the command used from the directory.:

     #
     gci  | foreach { certutil -hashfile $_.fullname MD5 }
     

I had other files in the directory so I wanted to filter only on those files:

     #
     gci -filter *.ova.7z.0** | foreach { certutil -hashfile $_.fullname MD5 }