Get full path of the files in PowerShell

Question

I need to get all the files including the files present in the subfolders that belong to a particular type.

I am doing something like this, using Get-ChildItem:

Answer 1

This should perform much faster than using late filtering:

Get-ChildItem C:\WINDOWS\System32 -Filter *.txt -Recurse | % { $_.FullName }

Answer 2

You can also use Select-Object like so:

Get-ChildItem "C:\WINDOWS\System32" *.txt -Recurse | Select-Object FullName

Answer 3

Add | select FullName to the end of your line above. If you need to actually do something with that afterwards, you might have to pipe it into a foreach loop, like so:

get-childitem "C:\windows\System32" -recurse | where {$_.extension -eq ".txt"} | % {
     Write-Host $_.FullName
}

Answer 4

Really annoying thing in PS 5, where $_ won't be the full path within foreach. These are the string versions of FileInfo and DirectoryInfo objects. For some reason a wildcard in the path fixes it, or use Powershell 6 or 7. You can also pipe to get-item in the middle.

Get-ChildItem -path C:\WINDOWS\System32\*.txt -Recurse | foreach { "$_" }

Get-ChildItem -path C:\WINDOWS\System32 -Recurse | get-item | foreach { "$_" }

This seems to have been an issue with .Net that got resolved in .Net Core (Powershell 7): Stringification behavior of FileInfo / Directory instances has changed since v6.0.2 #7132

Answer 5

gci "C:\WINDOWS\System32" -r -include .txt | select fullname

Answer 6

Try this:

Get-ChildItem C:\windows\System32 -Include *.txt -Recurse | select -ExpandProperty FullName