Get last element of pipeline in powershell

powershell pipeline
dozacinc picture dozacinc · Dec 28, 2010 · Viewed 27.3k times · Source

This might be weird, but stay with me. I want to get only the last element of a piped result to be assigned to a varaiable. I know how I would do this in "regular" code of course, but since this must be a one-liner.

More specifically, I'm interested in getting the file extension when getting the result from an FTP request ListDirectoryDetails.

Since this is done within a string expansion, I can't figure out the proper code.

Currently I'm getting the last 3 hars, but that is real nasty. 

New-Object PSObject -Property @{

    LastWriteTime = [DateTime]::ParseExact($tempDate, "MMM dd HH:mm",[System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::InvariantCulture)

    Type = $(if([int]$tempSize -eq 0) { "Directory" } else { $tempName.SubString($tempName.length-3,3) })

    Name = $tempName

    Size = [int]$tempSize

}

My idea was doing something similar to

    $tempName.Split(".") | ? {$_ -eq $input[$input.Length-1]}

that is, iterate over all, but only take out where the element I'm looking at is the last one of the input-array.

What am I missing ?

Answer

Roman Kuzmin picture Roman Kuzmin · Dec 28, 2010

A few ways to do this:

$name = 'c:\temp\aaa.bbb.ccc'

# way 1
$name.Split('.') | Select-Object -Last 1

# way 2
[System.IO.Path]::GetExtension($name)

# or if the dot is not needed
[System.IO.Path]::GetExtension($name).TrimStart('.')

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