Vista - Reading a file archive going backwards...

I am looking for a bit of help. I have a couple of remote
transcriptionists and I have a report for all our transcriptionists
that reports on the total number of dictations that they have
currently assigned to them. This report is still wrong a lot of times,
based on whether or not these two are connected and a have a current
file from them.

I have the following that I am doing:

$user7 = "User Name"
$filepath7 = "\\wkstn0020\newsletter\DictationCounts_KP.txt"

$testUser = Test-Path $filepath7
if($testUser -eq $TRUE){
[INT]$count7 = (gc $filepath7)
}
elseif ($testUser -eq $FALSE){
[INT]$count7 = 0
}

At the end of the job I clean up these files. Adding the Date to the
files 20090618-

#Cleanup/Rename two temp files for Kathy and Christina
$rendate = (get-date)
$rendate=$rendate.tostring("yyyyMMdd")
Rename-Item \\wkstn0020\newsletter\DictationCounts_KP.txt $rendate-
DictationCounts_KP.txt

I would like to change the false portion above to start reading
backwards from the previous day, if it finds a file then use that
count instead of the zero. I am starting to confuse myself as I am
thinking too hard about this I think. If for some reason (weekend,
vacation, days off) it could be several days back before I would have
a file, which would be about as accurate as I can get.

Thanks for any help.

Tim

I don't think I know all the requirements you seem to have, but here's the
approach I think you want to take. Note that I'm ignoring what you say about
errors since I'm not clear whether you mean errors thrown by your script,
functional errors you believe are caused by the script, or something else.
I'm also unclear about the renaming operation details. Here's what I'm
assuming your requirements are and then a solution.

requirements: You want to get the content of the most recent dictation
counts file. When created the file is named DictationCounts_KP.txt. If that
file exists, you'll read it and then change it's name to
yyyymmdd-DictationCounts_KP.txt. If the file does not exist, you want the
most recent dictationcounts file. From what I can see, this implies that
you're OK with renaming the file as soon as you see it.

I would simply do this:

$sharepath ="\\wkstn0020\newsletter"
$filename = "DictationCounts_KP.txt"
#Start out by renaming the new dictationscount file if it exists
if(test-path $sharepath\$filename){
$today =(Get-Date).ToString("yyyyMMdd")
Rename-Item $sharepath\$filename $sharepath\$today-$filename
}
# Now ALL of the files should have names in the form of
# numbers followed by "-DictationCounts_KP.txt"
# we get all names that match the wildcard pattern
# [0-9]*-DictationCounts_KP.txt
# and sort them DESCENDING. Given the naming convention,
# that means the most recent existing file is going to be first
# in the returned list.
gc (Get-ChildItem $sharepath\[0-9]*-$filename | sort Name -Desc)[0]

"TimParker" <timpar@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2fc3571b-6513-4126-a8ec-3963cbe47d57@xxxxxx