Exclude directories in PowerShell

Question

I want to exclude all directories from my search in PowerShell. Both FileInfo and DirectoryInfo contain Attributtes property that seems to be exactly what I want, but I wasn't able to find out how to filter based on it. Both

ls | ? { $_.Attributes -ne 'Direcory' }
ls | ? { $_.Attributes -notcontains 'Direcory' }

didn't work. How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can use the PSIsContainer property:

gci | ? { !$_.PSIsContainer }

Your approach would work as well, but would have to look like this:

gci | ? { !($_.Attributes -band [IO.FileAttributes]::Directory) }

as the attributes are an enum and a bitmask.

Or, for your other approach:

gci | ? { "$($_.Attributes)" -notmatch "Directory" }

This will cause the attributes to be converted to a string (which may look like "Directory, ReparsePoint"), and on a string you can use the -notmatch operator.

Answer 2

You can also filter out directories by looking at their type directly:

ls | ?{$_.GetType() -ne [System.IO.DirectoryInfo]}

Directories are returned by get-childitem (or ls or dir) of type System.IO.DirectoryInfo, and files are of type System.IO.FileInfo. When using the types as literals in Powershell you need to put them in brackets.

Answer 3

I use

Get-ChildItem -include *.*

[edit] but it does not always work, apparently, (see comments) so use at your own risk. [edit]

The opposite is needed more often, though. (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1330648/powershell-analog-to-dir-ad-win-or-ls-d-bash/2526109#2526109)

Come to think about it, I do not really understand why it works...