Why is PS Get-ChildItem so difficult - powershell

Question

I did a ton of reading and searching about a way to have Get-ChildItem return a dir listing in wide format, in alphabetical order, with the number of files and directories in the current directory. Here is a image of what I ended up with, but not using GCI.
I ended up writing a small PS file.
$bArgs = "--%/c"
$cArgs = "Dir /n/w"
& cmd.exe -ArgumentList $bArgs $cArgs
As you can see I ended up using the old cmd.exe and passing the variables I wanted. I made an alias in my PS $Profile to call this script.
Can this not be accomplished in PS v5.1? Thanks for any help or advice for an old noob.

Answer 1

PowerShell's for-display formatting differs from cmd.exe's, so if you want the formatting of the latter's internal dir command, you'll indeed have to call it via cmd /c, via a function you can place in your $PROFILE file (note that aliases in PowerShell are merely alternative names and can therefore not include baked-in arguments):
function lss { cmd /c dir /n /w /c $args }
Note that you lose a key benefit of PowerShell: the ability to process rich objects:
PowerShell-native commands output rich objects that enable robust programmatic processing; e.g., Get-ChildItem outputs System.IO.FileInfo and System.IO.DirectoryInfo instances; the aspect of for-display formatting is decoupled from the data output, and for-display formatting only kicks in when printing to the display (host), or when explicitly requested.
For instance, (Get-ChildItem -File).Name returns an array of all file names in the current directory.
By contrast, PowerShell can only use text to communicate with external programs, which makes processing cumbersome and brittle, if information must be extracted via text parsing.
As Pierre-Alain Vigeant notes, the following PowerShell command gives you at least similar output formatting as your dir command, though it lacks the combined-size and bytes-free summary at the bottom:
Get-ChildItem | Format-Wide -AutoSize
To wrap that up in a function, use:
function lss { Get-ChildItem #args | Format-Wide -Autosize }
Note, however, that - due to use of a Format-* cmdlet, all of which output objects that are formatting instructions rather than data - this function's output is also not suited to further programmatic processing.
A proper solution would require you to author custom formatting data and associate them with the System.IO.FileInfo and System.IO.DirectoryInfo types, which is nontrivial however.
See the conceptual about_Format.ps1xml help topic, Export-FormatData, Update-FormatData, and this answer for a simple example.