PowerShell: Copy-Item Cannot find path

Question

I'm trying to get PowerShell to copy files from a remote computer (on which I have admin rights through AD) to the local computer. It fails in the strangest place. Here's a snippet of the script:

 $configs = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Filter "*.config" $serverUNCPath foreach($config in $configs){ $config_target_dir = $dest.Path + $config.Directory.FullName.Replace($serverUNCPath,"") if(Test-Path -Path $config_target_dir){ Copy-Item $config -Destination $config_target_dir } }

It fails with the message

Cannot find path 'D:\ServerDeploy\TestMachine1\website\web.config' because it does not exist. At :line:39 char:12 + Copy-Item <<<< $config -Destination $config_target_dir

The path D:\ServerDeploy\TestMachine1\website exists. I'm going mad over this.

What can I do to fix it?

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-14 20:35:12Z

11

Eeeeh.... OK?

If I replaced the line

 Copy-Item $config -Destination $config_target_dir

with

 Copy-Item $config.FullName $config_target_dir

it suddenly magically worked....

What gives?

edited Dec 14, 2009 at 20:35

Peter Mortensen

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answered Sep 3, 2009 at 7:22

AndreasKnudsen

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3 Comments

EBGreen Over a year ago

Don't forget that you are dealing with actual objects in PS. Generally speaking when you hand an object to a cmdlet the cmdlets are pretty good at choosing the right property to work with. In this case you are handing a System.IO.FileSystemInfo.FileInfo object to the Copy-Item cmdlet. I think the cmdlet is probably defaulting to using the .Name property and that is not enough information for the copy to work. When you explicitly give the .FullName property to the cmdlet, it now has the information that it needs.

AndreasKnudsen Over a year ago

hmm, that would explain the error, but not the crappy errormessage. Why report as an error that the target location does not exist?

Richard Berg Over a year ago

What's the current working directory at the time Copy-Item is executed? My guess is it's D:\ServerDeploy\TestMachine1\website. Like EBGreen said, Copy is treating $config as a relative path. Thus, it thinks that (join-path (pwd) $config.Name) is the full source location.

Marvin Xu · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-14 09:16:47Z

In my case, it turns out to be a case sensitivity issue. My source path is in WSL which is case sensitive.

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