Steve Fenton

Run Multiple PowerShell Scripts from a Master PowerShell Script

Having put together some individual scripts that ripped data out of an Excel spreadsheet, I decided to co-ordinate them with a master PowerShell script that would contain my variables and call out to neat little scripts to do work. PowerShell gets tricky to read when it gets big, so I prefer to have a couple of smaller files doing specific things.

Here is an example of the master script, which has the variables and makes all the co-ordinating calls.

$sourceFile = "C:\Temp\data.xlsx"
$csvDestination = "C:\Temp\data.csv"
$textDestination = "C:\Temp\Selenium\Domains.txt"
$katyleDestination = "C:\Temp\Katelyn\Domains.txt"

."./Create-Temp-File.ps1"

."./Export-To-Csv.ps1"

."./Export-Urls-For-Selenium.ps1"

."./Copy-Urls-For-Katelyn.ps1"

You’ll see that I’ve popped all the changeable stuff at the top of the file, then I make dot-sourcing calls out to each file, which brings them into scope – thus allowing them to use the variables I declared.

The files I call out to can then take care of a single thing, like copying excel data to a CSV, or extracting data from a single column in Excel. These sub-files won’t need to change because I’ve pulled all the “changeable bits” up into my master file.