One thing I need to do when testing file system scripts is generate a bunch of temporary files for experimenting with.  In the past I have just copied in whatever I could find to use as test data.  It is possible to easily generate test data of this sort using the New-TempFile function below.

The function takes two arguments – a path and a file size. My default values are given but they can be easily changed to suit you system.

After checking that the path exists I generate a random file name using GetRandomFile().  We could use GetTempFileName() but that creates an empty file in the temporary folder which isn’t quite what I want.

If the size is zero an empty file is created on the given path. Otherwise if size is supplied e.g.

New-TempFile -size 5kb

then a number of 128byte lines are written into the file.  If larger files are being routinely created increase the size of the string to 512 bytes – or put a test on say 100kb size and use the bigger string in that case.

Add-Content is used to write the data into the file.

One enhancement is to allow the setting of the file extension.