equivalent of (dir/b > files.txt) in PowerShell

Question

dir/b > files.txt

I guess it has to be done in PowerShell to preserve unicode signs.

Answer 1

In PSH dir (which aliases Get-ChildItem) gives you objects (as noted in another answer), so you need to select what properties you want. Either with Select-Object (alias select) to create custom objects with a subset of the original object's properties (or additional properties can be added).

However in this can doing it at the format stage is probably simplest

dir | ft Name -HideTableHeaders | Out-File files.txt

(ft is format-table.)

If you want a different character encoding in files.txt (out-file will use UTF-16 by default) use the -encoding flag, you can also append:

dir | ft Name -HideTableHeaders | Out-File -append -encoding UTF8 files.txt

Answer 2

Since powershell deals with objects, you need to specify how you want to process each object in the pipe.

This command will get print only the name of each object:

dir | ForEach-Object { $_.name }

Answer 3

Get-ChildItem | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name > files.txt

or shorter:

ls | % Name > files.txt

However, you can easily do the same in cmd:

cmd /u /c "dir /b > files.txt"

The /u switch tells cmd to write things redirected into files as Unicode.

Answer 4

Get-ChildItem actually already has a flag for the equivalent of dir /b:

Get-ChildItem -name (or dir -name)

Answer 5

Simply put:

dir -Name > files.txt

Answer 6

Just found this great post, but needed it for sub directories as well:

DIR /B /S >somefile.txt

use:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Fullname | Out-File Somefile.txt

or the short version:

ls | % fullname > somefile.txt