How can I exclude multiple folders using Get-ChildItem -exclude

Question

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   gt   search pro

User · Answer

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

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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

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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

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You could also do this in a single statement   j    quot Somepath quot   files   Get-ChildItem -Path  j -Include    xlsx     zip  -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue    File         Directory -notlike  quot  j donotwantfoldername quot

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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

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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

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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

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may be in your case you could reach this with the following       mv excluded dir         ls -R      mv    excluded dir

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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    Remove the Exclude parameter from Get-ChildItem  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

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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  amp  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

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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

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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

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I d do it like this   Get-ChildItem -Path  folder -r                      PsIsContainer -and    FullName -notmatch  archive

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