How to properly use -Exclude in Remove-Item for a list of string from a variable in Powershell?

Question

I have a variable that stored the list of files to be removed in this format:

$list = """" + "file1.txt" + """"

and a complete $list would be looking something like this:

$list
"file1.txt","file2.txt","file3.txt",...

and trying to use Remove-Item with the variable failed, it removed all the files:

Remove-Item -Recurse -Path "c:\myfiles\*" -Exclude $list

How to properly achieve this? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You're close but $list needs to be an array not a string (with excess quotes).

Just quote each element, and separate them with a comma to do this:

$list = "file1.txt","file2.txt"

Remove-Item -Path "c:\myfiles\*" -Recurse -Exclude $list -WhatIf

---

I would also recommend reading about_quoting_rules as it seems you don't know that double and single quotes do different things.

Using single quotes instead:

$list = """" + "file1.txt" + """"

can be expressed as:

$list = '"file1.txt"'

(These extra quotes aren't needed for the code above)