Powershell GetDate Method Formatting Question (How can I get it to return MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS)

Question

Hi I am looking for some assistance with getting this bit of code to work.

I am trying to get back the current date and time in the following format 11/09/2020 00:00:00 using the Date-Time method.

How can I do that?

For example

Where-Object
{
$_.Created -ge "11/09/2020 00:00:00"
}

Thanks

Answer 1

You don't need to cast to [DateTime] if you're using Get-Date because it already outputs a [DateTime] object. I'm also not sure why you are calling Get-Date twice.

All you need is this:

(Get-Date).AddHours(-24)

or

(Get-Date).AddDays(-1)

or the equivalent:

[DateTime]::Now.AddDays(-1)

Answer 2

Dates in PowerShell are usually [DateTime] .NET objects. It depends on what you want to do and your current language settings.

Your "for example" isn't too enlightening. Is $_ a file object in your example? In that case it would be

Where-Object { $_.CreationTime -ge "11/9/2020" }

In my example above for my locale, this would return file objects created on or after November 9 2020.

You can see what strings you can use right at the PowerShell prompt. Example from my system:

PS C:\> [DateTime] "11/9/2020"
Monday, November 9, 2020 12:00:00 AM

Because I didn't add a time stamp, it assumes midnight.

Answer 3

Using string comparisons when dealing with DateTime object hardly ever works the way you think they should. :-)

Your example would be correct if you cast the string as a DateTime object: Where-Object {$_.CreationTime -ge [DateTime]"11/9/2020"}

Answer 4

Yes; you can explicitly cast to [DateTime], but in this case the conversion is implicit and works because the left-hand side is a [DateTime].

Example:

PS C:\> $dt = [DateTime] "11/9/2020"
PS C:\> $dt -eq "2020/11/09 12:00am"
True

Note how the right-hand side of the comparison is a string (even with a different date format and including the time); because the left hand side is a [DateTime], PowerShell casts the right-hand side to [DateTime] and the comparison returns true.

Answer 5

Hi,

Get-Date rerurns a System.DateTime object. You can format it to a string like Get-Date -format "MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss". But if you want to compare the dates, it's unnecessary to format it as you can only compare dates of type DateTime.

Best Regards，
Ian

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