How do I get only directories using Get-ChildItem?

Question

I\'m using PowerShell 2.0 and I want to pipe out all the subdirectories of a certain path. The following command outputs all files and directories, but I can\'t figure out h

Answer 1

A cleaner approach:

Get-ChildItem "<name_of_directory>" | where {$_.Attributes -match'Directory'}

I wonder if PowerShell 3.0 has a switch that only returns directories; it seems like a logical thing to add.

Answer 2

For PowerShell versions less than 3.0:

The FileInfo object returned by Get-ChildItem has a "base" property, PSIsContainer. You want to select only those items.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | ?{ $_.PSIsContainer }

If you want the raw string names of the directories, you can do

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | ?{ $_.PSIsContainer } | Select-Object FullName

For PowerShell 3.0 and greater:

Get-ChildItem -Directory

You can also use the aliases dir, ls, and gci

Answer 3

The accepted answer mentions

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | ?{ $_.PSIsContainer } | Select-Object FullName

to get a "raw string". But in fact objects of type Selected.System.IO.DirectoryInfo will be returned. For raw strings the following can be used:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | ?{ $_.PSIsContainer } | % { $_.FullName }

The difference matters if the value is concatenated to a string:

• with Select-Object suprisingly foo\@{FullName=bar}
• with the ForEach-operator the expected: foo\bar

Answer 4

In PowerShell 3.0, it is simpler:

Get-ChildItem -Directory #List only directories
Get-ChildItem -File #List only files

Answer 5

Less text is required with this approach:

ls -r | ? {$_.mode -match "d"}

Answer 6

You'll want to use Get-ChildItem to recursively get all folders and files first. And then pipe that output into a Where-Object clause which only take the files.

# one of several ways to identify a file is using GetType() which
# will return "FileInfo" or "DirectoryInfo"
$files = Get-ChildItem E:\ -Recurse | Where-Object {$_.GetType().Name -eq "FileInfo"} ;

foreach ($file in $files) {
  echo $file.FullName ;
}