Powershell navigating to unknown directory

Question

I have stumbled the unfortunate situation, having to be in a directory in which another directory is located:

C:\Test\[Folder with unknown name]\theFileINeed.txt

The structure mentioned above originates from a Zip-file from an external source. So i can not change the structure.

My goal is to navigate to the Directory with the unknown name, so it is my working directroy and I can execute further commands there. (Like Get-Childitem e.g.)

Is there a simple way to e.g. use the cd command to move into that directory?

I have fiddled around a bit with Resolve-Path but couldn't find a helpful solution.

Thanks in advance.

Please edit the question and explain with more details what you are trying to achieve. How is the name of unknown directory created in the first place? — vonPryz
Maybe dir C:\Test\*\theFileINeed.txt | ForEach-Object { $_ | Split-Path -Parent } or dir C:\Test\*\theFileINeed.txt | Split-Path -Parent — JosefZ

AdamL AdamL · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-06T11:36:12

Consider this structure:

C:\TMP\TEST
├───unknowndir1
│   │   nonuniquefile.txt
│   │   uniquefile.txt
│   │
│   ├───nonuniquesubdir
│   └───uniquesubdir
└───unknowndir2
    │   nonuniquefile.txt
    │
    └───nonuniquesubdir

You could do cd .\test\*\uniquesubdir but you can't cd .\test\*\nonuniquesubdir as you'll gen an error (...) path (...) resolved to multiple containers. The same error is even with cd .\test\*\uniquesubdir\.. as if it didn't even check for existence of uniquesubdir.

So if you want to enter unknown directory based of a file it contains, you'd have to do something like this: cd (Get-Item .\test\*\uniquefile.txt).DirectoryName. It will fail if you use nonuniquefile.txt as it again resolves to two different directories. You could enter the first of these directories with cd (Get-Item .\test\*\nonuniquefile.txt).DirectoryName[0] if you don't care which of them you use.

Powershell navigating to unknown directory

1 Answers