List only Files and/or only Folders using PowerShell

The following PowerShell one liners will help you in getting a list of files and/or folders in a given folder. It can be useful to capture this information in a text file for later processing or even a spreadsheet.

PowerShell is very powerful in that it returns objects that you can manipulate.

For Example, to return the list of ONLY directories on the C:\ drive:

PS C:\> Get-ChildItem | where {$_.PsIsContainer}

Mode LastWriteTime Length Name —- ————- —— —- d—- 3/12/2009 12:28 PM Projects d—- 6/10/2010 9:38 AM cygwin d—- 9/21/2010 7:02 PM Documents and Settings …

Get-ChildItem can be run with no arguments to get all items, just like a ‘dir’ command. In fact, dir, ls, gci are aliases of the Get-ChildItem cmdlet.

In the following example, I will get the list of ONLY the directories and then from this I will take only the name. Also, I will use the alias ‘dir’

PS C:\> dir | where {$_.PsIsContainer} | Select-Object Name

Name —- Projects cygwin Documents and Settings …

If you wish to get the list of ONLY files, you just need to negate the where condition:
where {!$_.PsIsContainer}

PS C:\> Get-ChildItem | where {!$_.PsIsContainer} | Select-Object Name

Name —- .rnd AUTOEXEC.BAT CONFIG.SYS cygwin.lnk install_log

You can redirect this output to a text file for later processing:

PS C:\> Get-ChildItem | where {!$_.PsIsContainer} | Select-Object Name > onlyFiles.txt

Now let’s take it one step further and send this output to a CSV(Comma Separated Values) file.

PS C:\> Get-ChildItem | where {!$_.PsIsContainer} | Select-Object Name | Export-Csv onlyFiles.csv