Using the New-Timespan Cmdlet
Performing Date Arithmetic
The New-TimeSpan cmdlet provides a way to do date arithmetic within Windows PowerShell. For example, this command tells you the number of days between today’s date and New Year’s Eve 2006:
New-TimeSpan $(Get-Date) $(Get-Date -month 12 -day 31 -year 2006)
When this command was run on May 10, 2006 we got back the following:
Days : 235
Hours : 0
Minutes : 0
Seconds : 0
Milliseconds : 0
Ticks : 203040000000000
TotalDays : 235
TotalHours : 5640
TotalMinutes : 338400
TotalSeconds : 20304000
TotalMilliseconds : 20304000000
Note. All those who knew that there were 20,304,000,000 milliseconds between May 10, 2006 and December 31, 2006 please raise your hands. |
To use New-TimeSpan you just need to pass it a pair of date-time values. The best way to do that is to use the Get-Date method; that helps ensure that you get a pair of date-time objects that New-TimeSpan can work with. For our first date, we simply use the Get-Date cmdlet without any additional parameters (note that the cmdlet must be enclosed in parentheses):
$(Get-Date)
For our second date we also call Get-Date, but we tacked on the -month, -day, and -year parameters, along with the appropriate values:
New-TimeSpan $(Get-Date) $(Get-Date -month 12 -day 31 -year 2006)
What if you need to know how long it is until a more specific time, such as 11:30 PM on December 31st? As usual, no problem: just include the -hour and the -minute parameters along with the appropriate values (for the hours, use the 24-hour time format). In other words:
New-TimeSpan $(Get-Date) $(Get-Date -month 12 -day 31 -year 2006 -hour 23 -minute 30)