PowerShell get-childitem refusal to exclude directory

Question

I am trying to simply search for files in a network share, but exclude a useless directory. I know there is the -exclude option for get-childitem .

However, when I try to run the command get-childitem -recurse -exclude \\\\share\\folder\\excludeddir , PowerShell ignores the -exclude parameter. Any and all permutations of the exclusion path have been attempted.

Why is powershell ignoring the -exclude parameter? Is there any way to simply exclude a directory without having to write multiple lines of code? And no, the method of piping to | ? { $_.FullName -inotmatch 'excludeddir' } | ? { $_.FullName -inotmatch 'excludeddir' } | ? { $_.FullName -inotmatch 'excludeddir' } is not usable, as it is completely ignored by powershell if it is used within a network share.

Answer 1

You can do the following if you want to exclude all files within a folder called Desktop .

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Where {
    $_.Directory.Name -ne 'Desktop'
    } | Select-String -Pattern 'mystring'

Explanation:

The problem with -Exclude is that it only applies to the leaf item of the current item's path. The online documentation falls short in explaining how -Exclude works and the idiosyncrasies of it. So if you exclude Desktop , any file named Desktop or any folder path that ends with a folder named Desktop would be excluded. It however, does not exclude any subfolders or subfiles of an excluded directory when -Recurse is used. I do not know if that is by design or an oversight.

If you are only searching for files, the -File parameter only returns files. Since FileInfo objects have a Directory property, which is a DirectoryInfo object, you can reference its Name property to determine the parent directory name of a returned file.