How to group Get-ChildItem -Recurse results in one output table? - powershell

Question

I'm using the following Powershell command:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.txt
But if there's multiple results the output will be like this:
Directory: C:\TestFolder\myfolder\
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
-a--- d/m/yyyy hh:MM PM 1234 dragons.txt
Directory: C:\TestFolder\anotherfolder\
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
-a--- d/m/yyyy hh:MM PM 66550 jabberwocky.txt
But I want to get grouped results in some form.
Maybe like this:
Mode LastWriteTime Length Directory Name
---- ------------- ------ --------- ----
-a--- d/m/yyyy hh:MM PM 1234 C:\TestFolder\myfolder\ dragons.txt
-a--- d/m/yyyy hh:MM PM 66550 C:\TestFolder\anotherfolder\ jabberwocky.txt
Or this:
Length FullPath
------ --------
1234 C:\TestFolder\myfolder\dragons.txt
66550 C:\TestFolder\anotherfolder\jabberwocky.txt
You probably get the idea. How can I accomplish this, preferably in a simple and elegant manner?
I tried Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.txt | Format-Table but that doesn't do much. I've also checked the most relevant similar questions suggested by Stack Overflow (i.e. "Recurse with PowerShell's Get-ChildItem", and others), but haven't been able to distill a solution so far.
Addendum:
I used help group and found that group is actually the exact alias for the Cmdlet I thought I was looking for: Group-Object. If I do this:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.txt | Group-Object "FullName"
I get:
Count Name Group
----- -------- -----
1 C:\TestFold... {C:\TestFolder\myfolder\dragons.txt}
1 C:\TestFold... {C:\TestFolder\anotherfolder\jabberwocky.txt}
But this requires me to simplify with an additional step to:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.txt | Group-Object "FullName" | Select-Object "Name"
Which gets:
Name
----
C:\TestFolder\myfolder\dragons.txt
C:\TestFolder\anotherfolder\jabberwocky.txt
If I really want extra properties, then I guess I want to "group on multiple properties", making the question effectively a duplicate of this other SO question.
However, all this "grouping" seems like overkill. Is there not a direct way of using Get-ChildItem to get the output I want?

Answer 1

PowerShell has its own way of displaying System.IO.DirectoryInfo and System.IO.FileInfo objects. If you don't want to see that then you just need to use Select-Object.
Get-ChildItem -Recurse c:\temp | select Mode,LastWriteTime,Length,Directory,Name
Group-Object is completely unnecessary. Given your need I suppose Group-Object seemed appealing but its power is not needed here like it is used for in the linked question. What you really wanted to do is change how PowerShell deals with those objects. Format-Table does not work for the same reason. It was taking the PowerShell by design output and making a table. If you called the properties with Format-Table you would have the same solution as we did with Select-Object.
Get-ChildItem -Recurse c:\temp | Format-Table Mode,LastWriteTime,Length,Directory,Name
Please... Please... don't use that line if you intend to use the output in other functions. Format-cmdlets break objects and are used for the purpose of displaying data only.

Answer 2

If you are just trying to get a list of files recursively with their fullpath names, don't use Group or Select. All of these Commands pretends to be a spreadsheet of objects displayed in a text console.
Instead use the foreach-object operator "%{ }" to dump the raw string date to the console. Example:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.txt | %{ $_.fullname }
(Incidentally the above is equivalent to linux command: "find .")
If you want to see which fields are accessible from the foreach-object script block. you can issue this command:
Get-ChildItem my_filepath | get-member
Alternatively, you could pipe the output of Get-ChildItem to Export-Csv command and open it in notepad.
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -file *.txt |
Select FullName |
Export-Csv "files.csv"
notepad files.csv
Alternatively, use cmd:
cmd /c dir /b /s *.txt