Powershell script to locate specific file file name

Question

I wanted to write a small script that searched for an exact file name  not a string within a file name   For instance if I search for  hosts  using Explorer  I get multiple results by default  With the script I want ONLY the name I specify  I m assuming that it s possible    I had only really started the script and it s only for my personal use so it s not important  it s just bugging me  I have several drives so I started with 2 inputs  one to query drive letter and another to specify file name  I can search by extension  file size etc but can t seem to pin the search down to an exact name   Any help would be appreciated   EDIT   Thanks to all responses  Just to update  I added one of the answers to my tiny script and it works well  All three responses worked but I could only use one ultimately  no offence to the other two  Cheers  Just to clarify   npp  is an alias for Notepad   to open the file once found    drv   read-host  Choose drive   fname   read-host  File name   req   dir -Path  drv -r   Where-Object     PsIsContainer -and   System IO Path   GetFileNameWithoutExtension    Name  -eq  fname   set-location  req directory npp  req

User · Answer

I m using this function based on  Murph answer  It searches inside the current directory and lists the full path   function findit    filename    args 0   gci -recurse -filter     filename    -file -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue   foreach-object        place path      directory     echo    place path                  Example usage  findit myfile

User · Answer

From a powershell prompt  use the gci cmdlet  alias for Get-ChildItem  and -filter option   gci -recurse -filter  hosts    This will return an exact match to filename  hosts       SteveMustafa points out with current versions of powershell you can use the -File switch to give the following to recursively search for only files named  hosts   and not directories or other miscellaneous file-system entities    gci -recurse -filter  hosts  -File      The commands may print many red error messages like  Access to the path  C  Windows Prefetch  is denied     If you want to avoid the error messages then set the -ErrorAction to be silent   gci -recurse -filter  hosts  -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue     An additional helper is that you can set the root to search from using -Path    The resulting command to search explicitly search from  for example  the root of the C drive would be  gci -Recurse -Filter  hosts  -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Path  C

User · Answer

Assuming you have a Z  drive mapped   Get-ChildItem -Path  Z   -Recurse   Where-Object     PsIsContainer -and  System IO Path   GetFileNameWithoutExtension    Name  -eq  hosts

User · Answer

To search the whole computer   gdr -PSProvider  FileSystem       ls -r    root  2 gt  null   where      name -eq  httpd exe

User · Answer

I use this form for just this sort of thing   gci   hosts -r          PSIsContainer      maps to positional parameter Path and  hosts  maps to positional parameter Filter  I highly recommend using Filter over Include if the provider supports filtering  and the filesystem provider does   It is a good bit faster than Include

User · Answer

In findFileByFilename ps1 I have     https   stackoverflow com questions 3428044 powershell-script-to-locate-specific-file-file-name  filename   Read-Host  What is the filename to find   gci   -recurse -filter  filename -file -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue   tested works from pwd recursively    This works great for me  I understand it    I put it in a folder on my PATH    I invoke it with    gt  findFileByFilename ps1

User · Answer

To search the whole computer  gdr -PSProvider  FileSystem       ls -r   root  2 gt  null   where     name -eq  quot httpd exe quot     I am pretty sure this is a much less efficient command  for MANY reasons  but the simplest is your piping everything to your where-object command  when you could still use -filter  quot httpd exe quot  and save a ton of cycles  Also  on a lot of computers the get-psdrive is gonna grab shared drives  and I am pretty sure you wanted that to get a complete search  Most shares can be IMMENSE with regard to the sheer number of files and folders  so at the very least I would sort my drives by size  and add a check after each search to exit the loop if we locate the file  That is if you are looking for a single instance  if not the only way to save yourself the IMMENSE time sink of searching a 10TB share or two  is to comment the command and highly suggest any user who were to need to use it should limit their search as much as they can  For instance our User Profile share is 10TB  at least the one I am on is  and I can limit my search to the directory  sharedrive users myname and search my 116GB directory rather than the 10TB one  Too many unknowns with shares for this type of script  which is already super inefficient with regard to resources and speed  If I was seriously considering using something like this  I would add a call to a 3rd party package and leverage a DB

[powershell] Powershell script to locate specific file/file name?

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