You can use the following basic syntax to calculate the difference between two dates in PowerShell:
$date_diff = New-TimeSpan -Start $date1 -End $date2
This particular example calculates the difference between the starting date stored in the $date1 variable and the ending date stored in the $date2 variable.
Note that we store the results in a new TimeSpan variable named $date_diff.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Calculate Date Difference in PowerShell
Suppose that we create the following date variables in PowerShell:
- $date1 : The current date
- $date2: The current date plus 50 days
We can use the following syntax to calculate the difference between the two dates:
$date1 = Get-Date
$date2 = (Get-Date).AddDays(50)
$date_diff = New-TimeSpan -Start $date1 -End $date2
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
The new $date_diff variable contains the date difference between the start and end dates that we specified.
We can see that the difference between the two dates is 50 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 5 seconds and 824 milliseconds.
If we would like to access only one of these units of time, we can do so.
For example, we can use the following syntax to only return the date difference in days:
$date1 = Get-Date
$date2 = (Get-Date).AddDays(50)
$date_diff = (New-TimeSpan -Start $date1 -End $date2).Days
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
We can see that the date difference between these two dates is 50 days.
Note: Feel free to replace Days with Hours, Minutes, Seconds, etc. to access a different unit of time.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
How to Compare Dates in PowerShell
How to Compare Two Arrays in PowerShell
How to Compare Two Strings in PowerShell
