Powershell: Process CSV to remove not-needed fields

[Scarpozzi]

I'm trying to teach myself powershell and have never used it for anything.

I have a large CSV file called people.txt that contains USERNAME,FIRST,MIDDLE,LAST,SUFFIX,IDNUMBER,ZIPCODE


I've been looking at Import-Csv, but don't know how to exclude or append data. Basically, what I want to do is use the information in this file to generate another file that contains the following:

USERNAME@company.com FIRST LAST

and repeats to the end of the file. (yeah...this is to generate a company email list)

I'm wanting to do this in powershell to get my feet wet because I'll be rewriting a lot of other scripts soon enough and have never taken a class on it. (if you have any good books, please give me suggestions)

Thanks,

 

[Scarpozzi]

I think I got it

$p = Import-Csv c:\Automation\people.txt |foreach {
& "C:\windows\system32\xcopy.exe " + $_.USERNAME + " " $_.FIRST + " " + $_.LAST
(""+ $_.USERNAME + "@company.com " + $_.FIRST + " " + $_.LAST)
}
$p | Out-File -FilePath c:\Automation\output.txt

Example output is:
username@company.com firstname lastname
username@company.com firstname lastname
username@company.com firstname lastname
username@company.com firstname lastname

 

[Scarpozzi]

The only downside to this method is that when using xcopy and shuffling about 20k users from the file, it not only takes a long time to run, but creates a lot of CPU overhead as each entry in the CSV file is causing xcopy to kick off again.

I think I may try to do the same thing using this method:

http://windows-powershell-scripts.blogspot.com/2009/06/awk-equivalent-in-windows-powershell.html

It's what I've been looking for!

 

[Patterner]

I think I got it

$p = Import-Csv c:\Automation\people.txt |foreach {
& "C:\windows\system32\xcopy.exe " + $_.USERNAME + " " $_.FIRST + " " + $_.LAST
(""+ $_.USERNAME + "@company.com " + $_.FIRST + " " + $_.LAST)
}
$p | Out-File -FilePath c:\Automation\output.txt

Example output is:
username@company.com firstname lastname
username@company.com firstname lastname
username@company.com firstname lastname
username@company.com firstname lastname

I'm glad you found an answer, but I'm not sure why the xcopy was in there in the first place?

I would have just created a new array of objects with the info you wanted then used export-csv to write them to a new file.