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 EXCLUDE any folder with 'ARCHIVE' in it including the various different cases.

I've written the following which works except it doesn't exclude the folders !!

$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 $archive -Recurse | where {$_.Attributes -match 'Directory'} | ForEach-Object {$_.FullName} > $search_pro 

1

18 Answers

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.

4

I'd do it like this:

Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -r |
? { $_.PsIsContainer -and $_.FullName -notmatch 'archive' }

Note that -notmatch accepts a Regular Expression:

6

I apologize if this answer seems like duplication of previous answers. I just wanted to show an updated (tested through POSH 5.0) way of solving this. The previous answers were pre-3.0 and not as efficient as modern solutions.

The documentation isn't clear on this, but Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Exclude only matches exclusion on the leaf (Split-Path $_.FullName -Leaf), not the parent path (Split-Path $_.FullName -Parent). Matching the exclusion will just remove the item with the matching leaf; Get-ChildItem will still recurse into that leaf.

In POSH 1.0 or 2.0

Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -Recurse | ? { $_.PsIsContainer -and $_.FullName -inotmatch 'archive' }

Note: Same answer as @CB.

In POSH 3.0+

Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -Directory -Recurse | ? { $_.FullName -inotmatch 'archive' }

Note: Updated answer from @CB.

Multiple Excludes

This specifically targets directories while excluding leafs with the Exclude parameter, and parents with the ilike (case-insensitive like) comparison:

#Requires -Version 3.0
[string[]]$Paths = @('C:\Temp', 'D:\Temp')
[string[]]$Excludes = @('*archive*', '*Archive*', '*ARCHIVE*', '*archival*')
$files = Get-ChildItem $Paths -Directory -Recurse -Exclude $Excludes | %{ $allowed = $true foreach ($exclude in $Excludes) { if ((Split-Path $_.FullName -Parent) -ilike $exclude) { $allowed = $false break } } if ($allowed) { $_ }
}

Note: If you want your $Excludes to be case-sensitive, there are two steps:

1. Remove the Exclude parameter from Get-ChildItem.
2. Change the first if condition to:
   • if ($_.FullName -clike $exclude) {

Note: This code has redundancy that I would never implement in production. You should simplify this quite a bit to fit your exact needs. It serves well as a verbose example.

6

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 

13

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.

1

You can exclude like this, the regex 'or' symbol, assuming a file you want doesn't have the same name as a folder you're excluding.

$exclude = 'dir1|dir2|dir3'
ls -r | where { $_.fullname -notmatch $exclude }
ls -r -dir | where fullname -notmatch 'dir1|dir2|dir3'

VertigoRay, in his answer, explained that -Exclude works only at the leaf level of a path (for a file the filename with path stripped out; for a sub-directory the directory name with path stripped out). So it looks like -Exclude cannot be used to specify a directory (eg "bin") and exclude all the files and sub-directories within that directory.

Here's a function to exclude files and sub-directories of one or more directories (I know this is not directly answering the question but I thought it might be useful in getting around the limitations of -Exclude):

$rootFolderPath = 'C:\Temp\Test'
$excludeDirectories = ("bin", "obj");
function Exclude-Directories
{ process { $allowThrough = $true foreach ($directoryToExclude in $excludeDirectories) { $directoryText = "*\" + $directoryToExclude $childText = "*\" + $directoryToExclude + "\*" if (($_.FullName -Like $directoryText -And $_.PsIsContainer) ` -Or $_.FullName -Like $childText) { $allowThrough = $false break } } if ($allowThrough) { return $_ } }
}
Clear-Host
Get-ChildItem $rootFolderPath -Recurse ` | Exclude-Directories

For a directory tree:

C:\Temp\Test\
|
├╴SomeFolder\
| |
| └╴bin (file without extension)
|
└╴MyApplication\ | ├╴BinFile.txt ├╴FileA.txt ├╴FileB.txt | └╴bin\ | └╴Debug\ | └╴SomeFile.txt

The result is:

C:\Temp\Test\
|
├╴SomeFolder\
| |
| └╴bin (file without extension)
|
└╴MyApplication\ | ├╴BinFile.txt ├╴FileA.txt └╴FileB.txt

It excludes the bin\ sub-folder and all its contents but does not exclude files Bin.txt or bin (file named "bin" without an extension).

1

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 | ....

Based on @NN_ comment on @Guillem answer, I came up with the below code. This allows you to exclude folders and files:

Get-ChildItem -Exclude 'folder-to-exclude','second-folder-exclude' |
foreach { Get-ChildItem -Path $_ -Exclude 'files-to-exclude','*.zip','*.mdmp','*.out*','*.log' -Recurse | Select-String -Pattern 'string-to-look-for' -List
}

You could also do this in a single statement:

$j = "Somepath"
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $j -Include '*.xlsx','*.zip' -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue –File | ? {$_.Directory -notlike "$j\donotwantfoldername"}

1

This is how I did it:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Name | ? {$_ -notmatch 'node_modules' }

This lists the full path of every file recursively that does NOT contains node_modules in its path. You should obviously change node_modules with any string you want to filter

#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

I wanted a solution that didn't involve looping over every single item and doing ifs. Here's a solution that is just a simple recursive function over Get-ChildItem. We just loop and recurse over directories.

function Get-RecurseItem { [Cmdletbinding()] param ( [Parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true)][string]$Path, [string[]]$Exclude = @(), [string]$Include = '*' ) Get-ChildItem -Path (Join-Path $Path '*') -Exclude $Exclude -Directory | ForEach-Object { @(Get-ChildItem -Path (Join-Path $_ '*') -Include $Include -Exclude $Exclude -File) + `` @(Get-RecurseItem -Path $_ -Include $Include -Exclude $Exclude) }
}

$CurrentPath = (Get-Location -PSProvider FileSystem).ProviderPath # Or your favorite path
$IncludeNames = "okFolder1", "okFolder2" # Items names to search
$ExcludeNames = "koFolder1", "koFolder2" # Items names not to search
$depth = 3 # Max level of depth to search
$FoldersToRemove = Get-ChildItem .\ -include $IncludeNames -Recurse -Depth $depth
-Attributes D # If you want only directories, change it as you desire
| ? { $_.fullname -inotmatch ($ExcludeNames -join '|') } #case insensitive or use -cnotmatch for case sensitive comparison
| foreach {$_.fullname} # If you want to project only full path information of matches

Here is another method using a remote server. The task here is to get a list of folders but exclude a number of well known folders on the remote server's C: drive. The final variable $AllFolders contains the result.

$Server = "<ServerName>"
$TopFolder = "\\$Server\C$"
$Exclude = @("*Inetpub*")
$Exclude += "*Program Files*"
$Exclude += "*Program Files (x86)*"
$Exclude += "*Windows*"
$ServerFolders = Get-ChildItem -Path $TopFolder -Exclude $Exclude | where {$_.PSIsContainer}
ForEach ($ServerFolder in $ServerFolders)
{ $CurrentFolders = Get-ChildItem -path $ServerFolder -recurse | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer } $AllFolders = $AllFolders + $CurrentFolders
}

Simpliest form in my opinion. Use -NotMatch on Fullname. Yes, it needs a recent version of PowerShell because I use -Directory.

$folder = "T:\Drawings\Design\*"
$search_pro = "T:\Design Projects\Design_Admin\PowerShell\search.pro"
$archive = 'archive'
Get-ChildItem -Path $folder -Directory | Where-Object Fullname -NotMatch $archive | Select-Object Fullname | Out-File $search_pro

I needed to exclude specific paths, not just directories of the same name anywhere in the tree, so I built on Jason Brower's answer to match directory paths instead of their names.

Solutions like Get-Childitem filespec -Recurse | Where-Object {$_ -excludecondition} do work, but they unnecessarily look into the excluded folders before dismissing them which can get expensive. (With pipes: "Filter left, process right")

$strSearchPath = 'D:\Project'
# Files to search for
$arFilePatterns = @( '*.ps?', '*.cmd'
)
# Directories to skip
# Example: you got 'Archive', 'Archive.old', 'Archive.bak' and want to include only 'Archive' in the search
# (think) exact matches
$arSkipDirs = @( 'D:\Project\Archive.old', 'D:\Project\Archive.bak'
)
# (think) wildcard to the right
<#
$arSkipDirs = @( 'D:\Project\Archive.'
)
#>
Function ListDirsSkipSome ($strPath, $strExcludeRegEx) { Get-ChildItem -Path $strPath -Directory | ForEach-Object { if ($_.FullName -inotmatch $strExcludeRegEx) { # recurse down the tree ListDirsSkipSome $_.FullName $strExcludeRegEx return $_.FullName } }
}
#Build a regex using array of excludes
# exact matches
$strRegEx = '^{0}$' -f (($arSkipDirs | ForEach-Object { [regex]::Escape($_) }) -join ('$|^'))
# wildcards to the right
#$strRegEx = '^{0}' -f (($arSkipDirs | ForEach-Object { [regex]::Escape($_) }) -join ('|^'))
# include root of search path
$arSearchDirs = @($strSearchPath)
# add list of directories excluding some
$arSearchDirs += ListDirsSkipSome $strSearchPath $strRegEx
# save current directory
$strPWD = (Get-Location).Path
# find files in listed dirs
# set type in case there is only 1 result
[array]$arSearchResult = $arSearchDirs |
ForEach-Object { # dive into each directory Set-Location -Path $_ # list files matching patterns (Get-ChildItem -File -Path $arFilePatterns).FullName
}
# return to previous directory
Set-Location -Path $strPWD
$arSearchResult

1

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

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

1

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