Powershell - quick way to read tab delimited file and sort by date column

Question

What is the best/quickest way to read a tab delimited file and process only a few columns

Sample

Name\tAddress\tCit\t\State\Zip\Date of Move

I am looking to only get column1 and colum6 for the next 30 days (Name , Date of Move and sort by Date of Move's scheduled in the next 30 days.....

Make sense...?

I have played with Get-Content | where-object and not had any luck....

UPDATE I was able to convert tabed file to csv.

Once I have the csv , I have done the following to get only the columns I need.

PS D:> import-csv .\test.csv | Select "Name", " MoveDate", "Address" | sort-object "MoveDate"

This returns the columns I need only, but does not sort by date...the date field sorts by string so.

1/12/2010 1/13/2010

I need it sorted as a datetime field....

My sample data looks like this in that field... 9/30/2009 12:21

Any ideas to get it to sort by actual date ?

Preferably return only the dates from today + 30 days.

TIA.

Answer 1

ConvertFrom-CSV has a -delimiter parameter. You should be able to specify tab. It returns objects, so you'd pipe it to "sort Date".

I'll have to look for how to specify a tab, though.

Found it..."`t"

So...try this:

convertfrom-csv .\test.csv -delimiter "`t" | sort-object MoveDate