How can I exclude multiple folders using Get-ChildItem -exclude?

Question

I need to generate a configuration file for our Pro/Engineer CAD system. I need a recursive list of the folders from a particular drive on our server. However I need to EXCL

Answer 1

My KISS approach to skip some folders is chaining Get-ChildItem calls. This excludes root level folders but not deeper level folders if that is what you want.

Get-ChildItem -Exclude folder1,folder2 | Get-ChildItem -Recurse | ...

• Start excluding folders you don't want
• Then do the recursive search with non desired folders excluded.

What I like from this approach is that it is simple and easy to remember. If you don't want to mix folders and files in the first search a filter would be needed.

Answer 2

may be in your case you could reach this with the following:

    mv excluded_dir ..\
    ls -R 
    mv ..\excluded_dir .

Answer 3

I know this is quite old - but searching for an easy solution, I stumbled over this thread... If I got the question right, you were looking for a way to list more than one directory using Get-ChildItem. There seems to be a much easier way using powershell 5.0 - example

Get-ChildItem -Path D:\ -Directory -Name -Exclude tmp,music
   chaos
   docs
   downloads
   games
   pics
   videos

Without the -Exclude clause, tmp and music would still be in that list. If you don't use -Name the -Exclude clause won't work, because of the detailed output of Get-ChildItem. Hope this helps some people that are looking for an easy way to list all directory names without certain ones.

Answer 4

The simplest short form to me is something like:

#find web forms in my project except in compilation directories
(gci -recurse -path *.aspx,*.ascx).fullname -inotmatch '\\obj\\|\\bin\\'

And if you need more complex logic then use a filter:

  filter Filter-DirectoryBySomeLogic{
  
      param(
      [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
      $fsObject,
      [switch]$exclude
      )
          
      if($fsObject -is [System.IO.DirectoryInfo])
      {
          $additional_logic = $true ### replace additional logic here
  
          if($additional_logic){
              if(!$exclude){ return $fsObject }
          }
          elseif($exclude){ return $fsObject }
      }
          
  }
  
  gci -Directory -Recurse | Filter-DirectoryBySomeLogic | ....

Answer 5

The exclusion pattern should be case-insensitive, so you shouldn't have to specify every case for the exclusion.

That said, the -Exclude parameter accepts an array of strings, so as long as you define $archive as such, you should be set.

$archive = ("*archive*","*Archive*","*ARCHIVE*");

You also should drop the trailing asterisk from $folder - since you're specifying -recurse, you should only need to give the top-level folder.

$folder = "T:\Drawings\Design\"

Fully revised script. This also changes how you detect whether you've found a directory, and skips the Foreach-Object because you can just pull the property directly & dump it all to the file.

$folder = "T:\Drawings\Design\";
$raw_txt = "T:\Design Projects\Design_Admin\PowerShell\raw.txt";
$search_pro = "T:\Design Projects\Design_Admin\PowerShell\search.pro";
$archive = ("*archive*","*Archive*","*ARCHIVE*");

Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -Exclude $archive -Recurse  | where {$_.PSIsContainer}  | select-Object -expandproperty FullName |out-file $search_pro 

Answer 6

#For brevity, I didn't define a function.

#Place the directories you want to exclude in this array.
#Case insensitive and exact match. So 'archive' and
#'ArcHive' will match but 'BuildArchive' will not.
$noDirs = @('archive')

#Build a regex using array of excludes
$excRgx = '^{0}$' -f ($noDirs -join ('$|^'))

#Rather than use the gci -Recurse option, use a more
#performant approach by not processing the match(s) as
#soon as they are located.
$cmd = {
  Param([string]$Path)
  Get-ChildItem $Path -Directory |
  ForEach-Object {
    if ($_.Name -inotmatch $excRgx) {
      #Recurse back into the scriptblock
      Invoke-Command $cmd -ArgumentList $_.FullName;
      #If you want all directory info change to return $_
      return $_.FullName
    }
  }
}

#In this example, start with the current directory
$searchPath = .
#Start the Recursion
Invoke-Command $cmd -ArgumentList $searchPath