PowerShell Dates: Date arithmetic with PowerShell

It does not intrinsicly include years, and months, it only calculate the days (hours, and minutes etc…) This days value includes any leap year days between the dates. But trying to convert the number of days into years and months and accounting for Leap years can be a bit of a pain. I could also make it a little shorter by removing the assignment of the day month and year values to individual varialbles, Software development articles for dummies but I think doing so makes it easier to follow the logic. If I wanted to get crazy I guess I could even use arrays for more variables, like the month day and year values reducing some lines there. I could also put the years, months and days into an array as well, to cut a few more lines. But it does the job that was asked for pretty well, so challenge is over and I should get back to work.

In the below code example we demonstrate an example using both. There are many different formatting identifiers available, and we will not list them all here but can be referenced here. All of these methods have “add” in the name and not subtract.

You’ll see as soon as you use the Format parameter, Get-Date no longer returns a DateTime object but now strings a string. Not only can you find differences in dates and times but you can also compare them using standard PowerShell operators. PowerShell knows when a date is “less than” or “greater than” another date.

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This means that you will have to convert the DateTime object to a string type and pass the localization that you want. To use this, let us show the example of adding two days and five hours to a date. We can chain the AddDays and the Addhours methods onto our date stored in the variable $CurrentDate. This will leave a number of days until your next birthday. The ‘if’ statement is added if your birthday has already happened at the time of the code, it simply reverses the sum to give a positive number. A colleague of mine has PowerShell script that queries a bunch of data from the last 90 days.

You will be amazed to know that answer to this question is simple than the question itself seems. PowerShell utilizes a Get-Date cmdlet to get the current date of your local system. This command is also used for formatting outputs that involve date and time. We have shown you various formats for getting the current date in PowerShell.

How many times have you had to figure out what date was X days, months, or years ago, or perhaps what time was Y minutes, hours, or seconds ago? Producing a report of all the users who have not logged in during the past 90 days is a pretty common request. It’s very easy to calculate date and time math with Windows PowerShell. The .NET Framework includes two data structures that you can use for calculating all sorts of date math – DateTime and TimeSpan. The first method simply returns the number of days in any given month when passed a year and month number.

Using TimeSpan objects, you can find date/time differences in just about any increment you’d like. One of the easiest ways to discover the current date with PowerShell is by using the Get-Date cmdlet. This command displays the current date and time as shown below. Is an independent consultant, technical writer, trainer and presenter. Adam specializes in consulting and evangelizing all things IT automation mainly focused around Windows PowerShell. Adam is a Microsoft Windows PowerShell MVP, 2015 powershell.org PowerShell hero and has numerous Microsoft IT pro certifications.

To compare dates, simply create two DateTime objects using PowerShell Get Date command or perhaps by casting strings with and then using standard PowerShell operators like lt or gt. Since we know that the Get-Date command outputs a DateTime object, is there more that we can do with this object? Not that we will go into every method, but there are a few methods that are very useful to use.

Understanding and Manipulating Dates and Time in PowerShell

I put the parenthesis around the statement to make sure that the execution happens correctly? Plus that should help me in the future to be clear on intent if I ever need to go back and read it, but I just want to be sure I am not missing something here… The forum is a fine place for picking my brain as other people might have the same question. Even trying to figure out how to do something or planning a PowerShell script is just as important as the actual mechanics and techniques. You have to decide if you want to count the start day or not.

Use PowerShell to determine the first day of the current calendar quarter. Simply, change the two values in the top two rows and run the code. For days in the past, make $Days negative and change the Hours, Minutes and Seconds to 0. It’s still a lot of code for $Profile, but I do like it & can simply call it from $Profile to keep that file clean.

You can see an example of using the ToShortDateString() and ToShortTimeString() methods below. #Subtracting 8 days from the current date using a negative number. If so, you can also use the DisplayHint parameter to achieve the same result. There are a handful of static functions that are very useful as well. As you can see, Thursday is now returned in the Dutch language using the nl-NL encoding.

• Anyone have any thoughts/helps/links to point me in the write direction?
• Now that you are aware of the basic methods of using dates, it’s time to delve deeper into the topic.
• There are many different formatting identifiers available, and we will not list them all here but can be referenced here.
• For days in the past, make $Days negative and change the Hours, Minutes and Seconds to 0.

PowerShell can do a lot of things and, like any good programming language, it can do just about anything you want with dates. Using the PowerShell Get Date command and other techniques, you can find today’s date, tomorrow’s date, format 3-Port FireWire Hub FH300, ATEN USB FireWire Hubs ATEN Corporate Headquarters dates, and a whole lot more. This command will also return the output as a String object. I was after something that could tell me, “is this date in this date range? Not to be confused for the alias of foreach in PowerShell.

Check whether a date is set for daylight savings time

Any code longer than three lines should be added as code using the ‘Select Code’ dropdown menu or attached as a file. The variable numberOfDays is the number of days we wish to add. You can see a few examples of the characters you can use with the Format parameter.

To subtract time, we simply need to pass in negative values. Utilize the “AddDays()” function and specify “-1” as a parameter for this Coding Qualitative Data function. Calling the “AddDays()” function with these specified settings will let you display Yesterday’s date in your PowerShell.

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I found something kind of what I would like done here in C#, but as I am still a novice, it is beyond my ability to convert it to a PowerShell acceptable form. Anyone have any thoughts/helps/links to point me in the write direction? There are many ways to do date arithmetic within PowerShell. Check out the Microsoft documentation for a full breakdown of all the characters you can use with the UFormat parameter.

The UFormat Parameter

The intention of the script is to only collect data from the current quarter, but depending on when the script is run the last 90 days could include time from the previous quarter. PowerShell is a cross-platform automation tool and configuration framework optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models. PowerShell includes a command-line shell, object-oriented scripting language, and a set of tools for executing scripts/cmdlets and managing modules.