Powershell pass arguments to robocopy nested in a Start-Job

Question

After a massive amount of headaches, I was able to get this almost functioning.

Problem: In the error/output Robocopy appears to be treating $args[4] (ref: $sourcePath) as everysingle IP in the range instead of just one object.

I'm assuming the rest of the syntax is correct, because if I switch $ip = 101..119 | foreach { "192.168.1.$_" } to $ip = "192.168.1.101" everything works correctly.

The Robocopy dumps into the console -source as all of the IP addresses in the range from $ip. What am I doing wrong here?

#####################################################
#Purpose: to ping an IP range of network locations in a loop until successful. When successful, copy new files from source onto storage.
#Each ping and transfer needs to be ran individually and simultaneously due to time constraints.
#####################################################

#define the IP range, source path & credentials, and storage path
$ip = 101..119 | foreach { "192.168.1.$_" } 
#$ip = "192.168.1.101"  #everything works if I comment above and uncomment here
$source = "\\$ip"
$sourcePath = "$source\admin\" 
$dest = "C:\Storage\"
$destFull = "$dest$ip\"
$username = "user"
$password = "password"

#This is how to test connection. Once returns TRUE, then copy new files only from source to destination.
#copy all subdirectories & files in restartable mode

foreach ($src in $ip){
Start-Job -ScriptBlock {
   DO {$ping = Test-Connection $args[0] -BufferSize 16 -Count 4 -quiet} 
   until ($ping)
    net use \\$args[1] $args[2] /USER:$args[3]
    robocopy $args[4] $args[5] /E /Z   
    } -ArgumentList $src, $source, $password, $username, $sourcePath, $destFull  -Name "$src"  #pass arguments to Start-Job's scriptblock
}

#get all jobs in session, supress command prompt until all jobs are complete. Then once complete, get the results.

Get-Job | Wait-Job 
Get-Job | Receive-Job

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 22 '18 at 00:22

1

At the point you create $source, $ip is an array, so $source ends up as a very long string of all the items concatenated:

\\192.168.1.101 192.168.1.102 192.168.1.103 192.168.1.104 ...

You can see this for yourself, by running just these two lines, then examining the contents of $source:

$ip = 101..119 | foreach { "192.168.1.$_" }
$source = "\\$ip"

This has a knock-on effect to $sourcePath which is used as $args[4] in your call to RoboCopy. You should build your paths inside your foreach loop, where you have access to each IP address ($src) from the $ip collection.

answered Mar 22 '18 at 00:22

boxdog

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That did it. Thank you! I was also getting some false positives on net use. My workstation has permissions to run robocopy in the test environment, so it was failing the net use but still succeeding on robocopy. I had done several different things with this code, so the structure was bad. Posted revised version below that utilized your advice for nesting paths inside instead of outside and referencing with -arguementlist. Thanks again – MSTigers Mar 22 '18 at 16:49

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 22 '18 at 15:03

Some sources/etc. are different, but that's just due to test environment. I decided to use the [io.path] for the paths since I was running into problems with $args when defining variables.

Thank you boxdog for the above help. I was completely overlooking that fact.

$ScriptBlock = {

$source = [io.path]::Combine('\\',$args[0])
$sourcePath = [io.path]::Combine('\\',$args[0],'c$','admin\')
$dest = "C:\Storage\"
$destFull = [io.path]::Combine($dest,$args[0])

    DO {$ping = Test-Connection $args[0] -BufferSize 16 -Count 1 -quiet} 
    until ($ping)
        net use $source password /USER:user
        robocopy $sourcePath $destFull /E /Z   
}

$ip = 101..119 | foreach { "192.168.1.$_" }

foreach ($dvr in $ip){
Start-Job $ScriptBlock -ArgumentList $dvr
}

Get-Job | Wait-Job 
Get-Job | Receive-Job

Powershell pass arguments to robocopy nested in a Start-Job

2 Answers2