A few weeks ago I was setting up OpenSSL on a Windows machine and I was following a Linux tutorial which used the “touch” command to create a new empty file.
To accomplish the task of creating a new empty file with PowerShell, the most straight forward way is to use the New-Item cmdlet:
1 | New-Item -Name EmptyFile.txt -ItemType File |
I inadvertently discovered another way to create a new empty file with PowerShell which I thought I would share with you guys, the readers of my blog.
You may see some people piping $null to the Out-File cmdlet, but when you pipe $null it doesn’t produce any output so you could simply use the Out-File cmdlet by itself:
1 | Out-File -FilePath EmptyFile2.txt |
Even though the length of the file created using Out-File is two instead of zero, it is indeed an empty file.
If I were typing the previous command interactively in the PowerShell console, I would omit the FilePath positional parameter, but I consider it to be a best practice to always use full cmdlet and parameter names in my blog articles.
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Nice. If you put -Encoding ascii at the end of your Out-File you get a 0 byte file. Otherwise it is using Unicode as the Encoding which would put 2 bytes for a nothing in the file.
I wrote a script that renames the TextFile.txt based on the CreateDate. Used Rename-Item to TextFile_2015-0608.txt. Archived the Renamed file. Deleted the Renamed file using Remove-Item and then Creates a New File file by the original name TextFile.txt using the (“$timestamp $LineSeperator” | Out-File TextFile.txt -Encoding ascii) approach
My issue is the Create Date of the New File is the same date as the deleted file.
Any thoughts on what might be causing this behavior
– Brooks
I found the cause of the CreationDate issue which is because Windows caches the original file information and creating a new file by the same name will assume those values.
This is described in a pose by David M. Candy titled “CreationTime set oddly in PowerShell”
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/44c7e8b4-778d-49cc-aad2-bdd40e90b55d/creationtime-set-oddly-in-powershell?forum=scripting
Unfortunately, there is no solution on how to clear that information before creating the file again.
My Work-Around solution was to set the CreationDate after creating the file:
$LogPath = “C:\Logs\TestFile.log”
Remove-Item -Path $LogPath -Force
$LineSeperator = ‘=’ * 60
$timestamp = Get-Date -DisplayHint Time
“$timestamp $LineSeperator” | Out-File $LogPath
(dir $LogPath).CreationTime = $timestamp
-Brooks
Awesome thank you so much
Good information Mike, seems to work like copy con of yesteryear.