PowerShell Core 6.0 is out! There’s a ton of new features and even some old commands are getting some love. Today we’re gonna talk about some of the improvements that made it into Split-Path. Let’s dive in and see what the team brought us.

The Good Stuff: There’s a new improved Split-Path with a couple quality of life changes, check it out!

Getting an Extension

Finding a file extension is a pretty common task. We had a couple of ways to do this before Powershell 6.0 was released, but none of which were straightforward. The first way was using Get-Item. This worked because Get-Item returned a System.IO.FileInfo object with an extension property we could inspect. Here’s an example that will get the extension of our PowerShell profile (spoiler alert, it’s going to be .ps1).

(Get-Item $PROFILE).Extension

Now if you didn’t have a profile, you might have noticed the first disadvantage of this method. For Get-Item to work, your file must exist. As you can imagine there’s plenty of scripting scenarios where this isn’t possible. To get around this, we can call a dot net method from System.IO.Path class, GetExtension. Here’s an example trying this on a file that doesn’t exist.

[System.IO.Path]::GetExtension('C:\temp\fakefile.txt')

This works but doesn’t feel PowerShelly. Well now in PowerShell 6, all we have to do is call Split-Path. There’s been a new switch added, -Extension that does just this. Here’s what it looks like. Noticed it also works for non-existent files.

Split-Path 'C:\temp\fakefile.txt' -Extension

Getting Just The Filename

Another common scenario we run into is when you have a path, and you need the filename without the extension. Previously there were two ways to accomplish this. The first was using Get-Item but this time returning BaseName property.

(Get-Item $PROFILE).BaseName

Remember though, this only worked if our file existed. Again we could use dot net to work around this.

[System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension('C:\temp\fakefile.txt')

In PowerShell 6, we can do the same thing with Split-Path, this time we’ll use the -LeafBase. Here’s what that looks like.

Split-Path 'C:\temp\fakefile.txt' -LeafBase

Splitting a UNC

Here’s a neat one. Previous to PowerShell 6, the Split-Path command didn’t work on UNC roots. For example, if ran Split-Path -Path \\server\share you would get a null result. To get this info, we would need to use Regex. Here’s what that would look like to get the server name for a UNC path.

if("\\server\share" -match '(?<ServerName>^\\\\([a-z0-9_.$-]+))\\(?<ShareName>([a-z0-9_.$-]+))')
{
    $Matches.ServerName
}

Simple right… Here’s a similar approach to pick out the leaf, or share name.

if("\\server\share" -match '(?<ServerName>^\\\\([a-z0-9_.$-]+))\\(?<ShareName>([a-z0-9_.$-]+))')
{
    $Matches.ShareName
}

Thankfully in PowerShell 6,Split-Path just works on UNC roots. You can use both -Parent or -Leaf and forget all about that regex gibberish. Pretty cool right? So what’s your favorite new little feature of PowerShell 6?