Powershell: Extracting strings from strings

I was playing with NCrunch.  It didn't work for our solution due to some bug w/ named parameters in attributes.  So I removed it.  But it left behind all kinds of little .xml files.  I could see these files in hg st as "?"'s and I wanted to remove them.

So I used this simple powershell command:

hg st | %{ [regex]::match($_, ". (.*)" } | %{ $_.Groups[1].Value } | %{ rm $_ }

The regex captures the name of the file, skipping the "? " at the beginning of the line.  The Groups[1].Value extracts that file name.  And rm removes it.

That version is using the .NET regex class directly and piping the object that matches outputs.  You can make this shorter, though slightly more confusing in some ways, using powershell's -match operator:

hg st | %{ $_ -match ". (.*)" } | %{ rm $matches[1] }

This is using the magic $matches variable which is set to the results of the last executed -match operator.  The reason I say this is slightly more confusing is that it depends on the order of execution of the pipeline.  This wouldn't work if the pipeline ran all the -match's and then ran all the $matches.  But because the pipeline is executing each %{} block once for each object, it does work.

If hg outputted objects instead of text, this would have been much easier.  But this shows how you can lean on regex's when you have to deal with strings.