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Powershell command to trim the path if it ends with "\"

I need to trim the path if it ends with \ .

 C:\Ravi\

I need to change to

 C:\Ravi

I have a case where the path does not end with \ (then it should skip).

I tried with .EndsWith("\") , but it fails when I have \\ instead of \ .

Is it possible to do this in PowerShell without resorting to conventions?

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4 answers

no need to complicate too much

 "C:\Ravi\".trim('\')
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Use TrimEnd (especially if you work with UNC Path):

 "C:\Ravi\".TrimEnd('\')
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You say that you need to distinguish between paths ending in "\" and "\\", and possibly handle them differently. Although you can use .Trim("\") or .TrimEnd("\") to remove the .TrimEnd("\") character "\" in the example you specified, both of these methods will remove all trailing slashes from your path.

The following regex will return True if your path ends with one "\", but false if it ends with a few "\" characters:

 $Path -match '.+[^\\]\\$'

Regular expression means:

  • String of as many characters as possible
  • To what is not a backslash
  • Following one backslash

Donation:

 "C:\Ravi\" -match '.+[^\\]\\$' True "C:\Ravi\\" -match '.+[^\\]\\$' False

Hope this helps / interesting .:-)

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Note. This solution is of interest only if you need to trim no more than two tags \ . You also want to support path delimiters / , want to handle root paths correctly, or are generally interested in regular expression methods.
If it is permissible to trim any non-empty mileage at the end of \ characters, i.e. also 3 or more (which is quite likely in this case), and the root paths do not require special treatment, use Martin Brandl a simple solution .

PowerShell-based solution -replace operator with a regex that handles both trailing \ and \\ , and also works with / , given that PowerShell accepts both \ and / as a path separator (which will also work with PowerShell Core version of Cross-Platfom): [1]

 # Remove at most 2 trailing "\" chars. PS> 'C:\Ravi\' -replace '[\\/]?[\\/]$' C:\Ravi #'# More simply, remove any number of trailing "\" chars. PS> 'C:\Ravi\' -replace '[\\/]+$' #'# equivalent of 'C:\Ravi\'.TrimEnd('\/') C:\Ravi

  • [\\/] is a character class ( [...] ) that matches a single character that is either \ (escaped as \\ to process as a literal) or / .

  • [\\/]?[\\/] matches one or two copies \ at the end of the ( $ ) line, [\\/]+ more weakly matches one or more ( + ).

  • Without specifying a replacement string, effectively removes the match from the string; if there is no match, the input string remains as-is.

To demonstrate that the approach works with various paths, including UNC paths:

 'C:\Ravi', 'C:\Ravi\', 'C:/Ravi/', 'C:\Ravi\\', '\\foo\bar\', 'C:\', '\' | % { $_ -replace '[\\/]?[\\/]$' }

The above gives:

 C:\Ravi C:\Ravi C:/Ravi C:\Ravi \\foo\bar C:

Note, however, that root path processing is problematic : C:\ was converted to C: and \ led to an empty string.

Fixing that - leaving the final \ in these special cases - requires a much more complicated regular expression (slightly simplified by matching any number of dividers of the trading path):

 'C:\Ravi', 'C:\Ravi\', 'C:\', 'C:\\', '\', '\\' | % { $_ -replace '(?:^((?:[az]:)?\\)\\*$)|(.*?)(?:\\+)$', '$1$2' }

This gives:

 C:\Ravi C:\Ravi C:\ C:\ \ \

Notice how the root paths (one) \ end now.

The special shell of the root paths is cumbersome, which is why it is sometimes preferable to provide rather than delete trailing \ or / (for example, C:\Ravi → C:\Ravi\ ) in order to facilitate the creation of paths with simple string concatenation (without worrying about doubling characters \ ). regex will become simple again:

 'C:\Ravi', 'C:\Ravi\', 'C:\', 'C:\\', '\', '\\' | % { ($_ -replace '[\\/]+$') + '\' }

This gives:

 C:\Ravi\ C:\Ravi\ C:\ C:\ \ \

Notice how all paths end (one) \ .

[1] String manipulation is sometimes required, but often you can rely on the Join-Path cmdlet to build paths for you, which gracefully handles the final \ part of the directory (for example, Join-Path C:\Ravi\ file.txt gives C:\Ravi\file.txt ); on the contrary, it saves \\ : Join-Path C:\Ravi\\ file.txt gives C:\Ravi\\file.txt ; however, while this is not very good, it is usually benign (such paths still work to access the file system).

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