Powershell - Exclude folders in Get-ChildItem

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