PowerShell: get all child items recursively - without bin/obj folders

Question

I want to get a list of all child items of a number of source folders I want to export (=copy) afterwards. However, I do not want to get the bin/obj folders and their sub contents.

My approach so far:

Get-ChildItem $RootDirectory -Attributes Directory -Include $includeFilder |
  Get-ChildItem -Recurse -exclude 'bin' |% { Write-Host $_.FullName }

However, it does not work. The problem seems to be that -exclude 'bin' does not match as the whole folder name down the road (something like C:\\Blubb\\bin ) is matched.

How to match only the folder name and not the whole path in the -exclude statement? Is there maybe an even better approach?

Answer 1

Using @Joey's example, you can re-arrange that a little to avoid searching the bin/obj folders:

gci $rootdirectory -Directory -Recurse |
   where { $_.FullName -notmatch '\\(bin|obj)(\\|$)' } |
   gci -File -inc $includeFilter | select FullName

Just move the -Recurse and where-object filter up to the first GCI, then GCI on each of the returned directories.

Answer 2

You can get a little more explicit. Not terribly nice, but should get the job done:

gci $rootdirectory -Directory -inc $includeFilder |
   gci -rec |
   where { $_.FullName -notmatch '\\(bin|obj)(\\|$)' }
   select FullName

You could perhaps even drop the second Get-ChildItem.

Answer 3

Reusable filter command:

filter Get-Descendents($Filter={1}) { $_ | where $Filter | foreach { $_; if ($_.PSIsContainer) { $_ | Get-ChildItem | Get-Descendents $Filter } } }

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Example:

dir C:\code | Get-Descendents { -not $_.PSIsContainer -or $_.Name -notin 'bin', 'obj'}

This won't enter a directory that fails the filter.

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It also allows you to predefine your filters and pass them as parameters.

Example:

$myDevItemFilter1 = { -not $_.PSIsContainer -or $_.Name -notin 'bin', 'obj'}
$myDevItemFilter2 = { -not $_.PSIsContainer -or $_.Name -notin '.svn', '.git'}

dir C:\code | Get-Descendents $myDevItemFilter1
dir C:\code | Get-Descendents $myDevItemFilter2