Powershell: Count items in a folder with PowerShell

Question

I'm trying to write a very simple PowerShell script to give me the total number of items (both files and folders) in a given folder (c:\MyFolder). Here's what I've done:

Write-Host ( Get-ChildItem c:\MyFolder ).Count; 

The problem is, that if I have 1 or 0 items, the command does not work---it returns nothing.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You should use Measure-Object to count things. In this case it would look like:

Write-Host ( Get-ChildItem c:\MyFolder | Measure-Object ).Count; 

or if that's too long

Write-Host ( dir c:\MyFolder | mo).Count; 

and in PowerShell 4.0 use the measure alias instead of mo

Write-Host (dir c:\MyFolder | measure).Count;