Exclude directories in PowerShell

Question

I want to exclude all directories from my search in PowerShell. Both FileInfo and DirectoryInfo contain Attributtes property that seems to be exactly what I want, but I wasn't able to find out how to filter based on it. Both

ls | ? { $_.Attributes -ne 'Direcory' } ls | ? { $_.Attributes -notcontains 'Direcory' } 

didn't work. How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can use the PSIsContainer property:

gci | ? { !$_.PSIsContainer } 

Your approach would work as well, but would have to look like this:

gci | ? { !($_.Attributes -band [IO.FileAttributes]::Directory) } 

as the attributes are an enum and a bitmask.

Or, for your other approach:

gci | ? { "$($_.Attributes)" -notmatch "Directory" } 

This will cause the attributes to be converted to a string (which may look like "Directory, ReparsePoint"), and on a string you can use the -notmatch operator.

PowerShell v3 finally has a -Directory parameter on Get-ChildItem:

Get-ChildItem -Directory gci -ad