How to Get Date Minus 1 Day in PowerShell

In PowerShell, you can get the date minus 1 day or the previous day using multiple ways.

The following methods show how you can do it.

Method 1: Using the Get-Date with AddDays(-1) method

# get the current date
$currentDate = Get-Date

# substract one day from the current date
$previousDate = $currentDate.AddDays(-1)

# output the previous day's date

Write-Output "Yesterday's date is: $previousDate"

This example will output the date of the previous day.

Method 2: Using the [DateTime] with AddDays(-1) method

# get the current date
$currentDate = [DateTime]::Now

# substract one day from the current date
$previousDate = $currentDate.AddDays(-1)

# output the previous day's date

Write-Output "Yesterday's date is: $previousDate"

This example will output the current date minus 1 day (the previous day’s date).

The following examples show how to use these methods to get the previous day’s date.

Using Get-Date to Get Previous Day Date

To get the date of the previous day in PowerShell, you can use the Get-Date cmdlet and subtract one day from the current date.

The following example shows how you can do it with syntax.

# get the current date
$currentDate = Get-Date

# substract one day from the current date
$previousDate = $currentDate.AddDays(-1)

# output the previous day's date

Write-Output "Yesterday's date is: $previousDate"

Output:

In this example, $currentDate contains the current date. We subtract 1 day from the $currentDate using AddDay(-1) and assign it to the $previousDate.

Finally, we display the previous day’s date using the Write-Output cmdlet.

After running the script, it will display the previous day’s date. For example, if today’s date is “17-April-2024“, it will display “16-April-2024 12:00:00 PM”.

The following example shows how to get the previous day’s date in the “dd-MM-yyyy” format.

If you want to get the previous day’s date in a specific format, use the ToString() method or the -Format parameter with the desired format string.

# Get the previous day's date in dd-MM-yyyy format
$previousDate = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString("dd-MM-yyyy")

Write-Output "Yesterday's date is: " + $previousDate

This will output the previous day’s date in the specified format.

Yesterday's date is: 16-04-2024

Using the [DateTime]::Now with AddDay(-1) to Get Previous Date

Another way to get the previous day’s date is by using the [DateTime] struct and its Now and AddDays() methods.

The following example shows how you can do it with syntax.

# get the current date
$currentDate = [DateTime]::Now

# substract one day from the current date
$previousDate = $currentDate.AddDays(-1)

# output the previous day's date

Write-Output "Yesterday's date is: $previousDate"

Output:

In this example, it outputs the date of the previous day.

If you want to get the previous day’s date in a specific format, use the ToString() method with the desired format string.

The following example shows how to get the previous day’s date in the “dd-MM-yyyy” format.

# Get the previous day's date in dd-MM-yyyy format
$previousDate = [DateTime]::Now.AddDays(-1).ToString("dd-MM-yyyy")

Write-Output "Yesterday's date is: $previousDate"

This example will output the previous day’s date in the specified format.

Yesterday's date is: 16-04-2024

Conclusion

I hope the above article on getting yesterday’s date or the previous day’s date in PowerShell is helpful to you.

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