Batch or PowerShell: How to get the last word from string? - string

Question

Here is my scenario:
I have a text file containing lot of lines. Each line is a path to a folder.
Example: 000.txt
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Blizzard Entertainment
I need to find a way to get the last child folder's name for each line and use it to create a folder link:
d:\>mklink /j office15 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15"
d:\>mklink /j acrobat "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat"
d:\>mklink /j "Blizzard Entertainment" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Blizzard Entertainment"
I have tried this:
$a="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15"
$a.Split()[-1]
With the result:
Office\Office15
I also tried:
$a.Split("`t",[System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)[-1]
And the result is:
5
How do I get the last word of each line or word after last \ by using Batch or PowerShell?

Answer 1

I assume those folders all already exist, if so there's a completely different way to consider:
Get-Content "000.txt" | Get-Item | foreach-object {
cmd /c mklink /J $_.Name $_.FullName
}
So for each folder name you get the DirectoryInfo object associated with that folder. Then you can directly extract the last part of the path from the Name property.
This also has the advantage that you'll get an error if any of the target folders don't exist before you attempt to link to it.

Answer 2

You were close, but forgot to specify the character you would like to split the string on, so it defaults to space:
$a="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15"
$a.Split('\')[-1]

Answer 3

Here is another simple way to do it in batch
#echo off
for /f "delims=" %%a in (000.txt) do (
mklink /j "%%~na" "%%~fa"
)

Answer 4

Using Batch - Take a look at the for command and string manipulation. You could do something like the following -
#echo off
setLocal enableDelayedExpansion
for /f "delims=" %%a in (000.txt) do (
set dir=%%a
set dir=!dir: =/!
set dir=!dir:\= !
for %%b in (!dir!) do set ldir=%%b
echo !ldir:/= !
mklink /j "!ldir:/= !" "%%a"
)
This script loops through the text document (I've used 000.txt, could change this to a variable), each time setting the variable dir to the current line, which we are assuming is a directory path. It then prepares the string for processing by the for command (without the /f switch to loop through at each space character) by replacing all spaces with / (a character that a directory name could not contain) and all \ characters with a space (so that there is now a space between each directory name). The for loop then sets the variable ldir to the last directory name.

Answer 5

PowerShell has a dedicated utility for splitting paths into their parent path (directory prefix) or leaf component (filename / directory name): Split-Path.
Split-Path -Leaf returns the last path component only, which enables the following solution:
Get-Content 000.txt | ForEach-Object { cmd /c mklink /j (Split-Path -Leaf $_) $_ }
Note the need to use cmd /c, because mklink is a command internal to cmd.exe.