Richard Siddaway's Blog

While I was playing around with the range operator I thought of this

Define your start and finish letters. Convert each to a char and then a byte.  This gives us the numeric value of the letter (ascii code).

We can then use those values in the range operator and create the files as we have already seen.

The range operator is used to generate a sequential set of numbers

1..10 | foreach {$_}

if we try this with letters

PS> a..j | foreach {$_}
The term 'a..j' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:5
+ a..j <<<<  | foreach {$_}
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (a..j:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

However we can use the range operator to generate letters like this

## upper case
65..90 | foreach {"$_ $([char]$_)" }

## lower case
97..122 | foreach {"$_ $([char]$_)" }

using the ACSII codes.  if we want to create filea.txt – filej.txt  we can simply do this

97..106 | foreach {New-Item -Path c:\test -Name "file$([char]$_).txt" -ItemType File}

Nice and simple one line of PowerShell.

One of the events in this years scripting games involved creating a set of files.  Many of the entries did something like this

A list of files is created and a foreach is used to call New-Item.  A variant on this used a for loop

for ($i=0; $i –le 9; $i++){New-Item -Path c:\test -Name $files[$i] -ItemType File}

There is a much easier way

Whenever you have to deal with lists of things that are numerically sequential – try to use the range operator.