find-to-set-alias.ps1

Inspired by Harry's post, I made an expanded version of find-to-set-alias suitable to putting into a script (.ps1) file, which includes warnings and diagnostic information, with an optional -quiet switch (more useful for your profile to automatically find and alias things, when you expect that they might not be there).

Source: find-to-set-alias.ps1

param(
  $foldersearch = $(throw "foldersearch required"),
  $filename = $(throw "filename required"),
  $alias = $(throw "alias required"),
  [switch]$quiet
)

if ((test-path $foldersearch) -eq $false) {
  if ($quiet -eq $false) { write-warning ("Could not find any paths to match " + $foldersearch) }
  exit
}

# If the user specified a wildcard, turn the foldersearch into an array of matching items
# We don't always want to do this, because specifying a non-wildcard directory gives false positives

if ($foldersearch.contains('*') -or $foldersearch.contains('?')) {
  $foldersearch = Get-ChildItem $foldersearch -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}

$files = @($foldersearch | %{ Get-ChildItem $_ -Recurse -Filter $filename -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue })

if ($files -eq $null) {
  if ($quiet -eq $false) {
    write-warning ("Could not find " + $filename + " in searched paths:")
    $foldersearch | %{ write-warning (" " + $_) }
  }
  exit
}

set-alias $alias $files[0].FullName -scope Global

if ($quiet -eq $false) {
  write-host ("Added alias " + $alias + " for " + $files[0].FullName)
  if ($files.count -gt 1) {
    write-warning ("There were " + $files.count + " matches:")
    $files | %{ write-warning (" " + $_.FullName) }
  }
}

Comments

[DevHawk]

Brad, call me late to the party but I just discovered your post (not sure why technorati didn't point it out to me). Anyway, I tried running this on my machine and it failed. I had to change the line

$files = $foldersearch | %{ Get-ChildItem $_ -Recurse -Filter $filename -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue }

to

$files = @($foldersearch | %{ Get-ChildItem $_ -Recurse -Filter $filename -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue })

i.e. adding the @(...) syntax. That forces the output to always be a collection, even if it's a single item. Before that, I was getting a failure in the line with $files[0].

[Brad Wilson]

Good catch! I've updated the post.