Powershell - Exclude folders in Get-ChildItem - powershell

Question

How to exclude folders ? Now I hardcode the folder names but i want it to be more flexible.
foreach($file in Get-ChildItem $fileDirectory -Exclude folderA,folderb)

Answer 1

"How to exclude folders ?" , if you mean all folders :
get-childitem "$fileDirectory\\*" -file
but it works only for the first level of $fileDirectory .
This works recursevly :
Get-ChildItem "$fileDirectory\\*" -Recurse | ForEach-Object { if (!($_.PSIsContainer)) { $_}}
or
Get-ChildItem "$fileDirectory\\*" -Recurse | where { !$_.PSisContainer }

Answer 2

You can do this by using the pipeline and a Where-Object filter.
First of all, the idiomatic way to iterate over a group of files in PowerShell is to pipe Get-Childitem to Foreach-Object. So rewriting your command gets:
Get-ChildItem $fileDirectory | foreach {
$file = $_
...
}
The advantage of using the pipeline is that now you can insert other cmdlets in between. Specifically, we use Where-Object to filter the list of files. The filter will pass on a file only if it isn't contained in a given array.
$excludelist = 'folderA', 'folderB'
Get-Childitem $fileDirectory |
where { $excludeList -notcontains $_ } |
foreach {
$file = $_
...
}
If you're going to use this a lot, you can even write a custom filter function to modify the list of files in an arbitrary way before passing to foreach.
filter except($except, $unless = #()) {
if ($except -notcontains $_ -or $unless -contains $_ ){
$_
}
}
$excludelist = 'folderA', 'folderB'
$alwaysInclude = 'folderC', 'folderD'
Get-ChildItem $fileDirectory |
except $excludeList -unless $alwaysInclude |
foreach {
...
}

Answer 3

#dvjz said that -file works only in the first level of a folder, but not recursively. But it seems to work for me.
get-childitem "$fileDirectory\\*" -file -recurse

Answer 4

For future googlers, I have found that files have a property called PSIsContainer which is $true when they are a directory.
A command listing all files in $fileDirectory would be:
foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem $fileDirectory | Where-Object -Property PSIsContainer -eq $false)
{
Write-Host $file.Name
}
Note that -Property is optional for the cmdlet Where-Object.

Answer 5

The simplest way to exclude your folders recursively:
foreach($file in Get-ChildItem $fileDirectory -Exclude {Get-ChildItem folderA},{Get-ChildItem folderB})
Where:
$fileDirectory - search folder
folderA, folderB - excluded folders