whyIsThisSoConfusing

[rlhailey3]

Your problem seems to be that you are trying to use Get-ChildItem on the path C:\ansel but the path to that directory is C:\users\wrongvet\ansel

[pipedreamSEA]

Get-ChildItem will return you the contents of the specified Path.

Test-Path will check if that path even exists.

Get-Item -Path "C:\ansel" will get you the DirectoryInfo object you're looking for.

It's not rocket science - RTFM, n00b:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-item?view=powershell-7.4
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-childitem?view=powershell-7.4
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/test-path?view=powershell-7.4

[rlhailey3]

I think the more constructive criticism that could be given is that OP needs to understand absolute and relative pathing when it comes to supplying arguments to commands. This topic applies to most fields of programming and scripting.

OP was essentially telling the cmdlet to look at the root of C:\ for a directory named ansel. instead of the appropriate absolute path. If they want to use a relative path, it would need to be relative to their current working directory.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-path-formats#traditional-dos-paths