About 3mos ago I had my work box rebuilt.  The encryption software glitched and it just wouldn’t boot.  So the helpdesk girl was able to slave the drive to another box and copy my files to a NAS.  I looked and all the folders were where they should be.  Great.

She then rebuilt the box and when I got it back I copied all the folders back.  I let it rest and I was very pleased that I was able to preserve all my scripts, etc.  A few days passed and I needed a script, so I went to that folder and it was empty.  WTx dude?  I looked and everything was still out on the NAS so I tried to get it off of there but they were missing there too.    OK, now I’m upset.  I’ve just lost most everything I cared about on my box.  It took me a while to accept it but I finally did.

Well, today (this is now several wks later) I finally went to replace one of the things I lost by downloading it again.  When I went to save it though, it said that it already existed and did I want to replace it.  See, I saved it to the same folder as before because I’m OCD that way.  Needless to say it took me about 2secs to figure out what had happened.  Normally I setup my box the way I want right away, but this time I got busy and just forgot.  And as it turns out my files were there, just hidden.  And I didn’t have ‘show hidden files’ checked in folder properties.  Now that I know the problem, how do I fix it because there’s a lot of files and folders to go through.  The answer of course is Powershell.  I got it right on the first try and the code is so small, and so compact, and so easy to come up with, it just screams PS.  And it is the perfect example of what PS is all about.  So here’s the query I used… enjoy

dir -recurse -force | %{$_.attributes = 'Archive'}

Now, here’s a brief explanation of a couple of the flags.

-recurse — means to run it against all the subfolders too.
-force — this is a good one because it tells PS to show you all the files.  If they’re hidden you won’t see them unless you use this flag.

So that’s it really.  A single line of code to unhide hundreds of files in dozens of folders and subfolders.  And since this is my first day back after vacation, I’d say I’m starting it off on a decent note.